Satya Nadella, smiling, in glasses, a navy jacket and grey T-shirt, against a light blue-white background

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Microsoft press photo). Image: Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has rebuilt Copilot from the ground up, and it’s betting big on AI agents. The company today unveiled what CEO Satya Nadella calls its “biggest update to Copilot to date”: a redesigned app with an agent called Autopilot that keeps working even when you don’t, a Code tab that builds apps from plain English, and a new Home, Microsoft announced. Nadella set out the ambition on X:

What’s new in Copilot

  • Home: a single starting point that combines quick Chat with Cowork, where longer jobs get handed off. You can review recent activity, pick up where you left off and create or edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without leaving Copilot.
  • Code: describe “an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in natural language,” and Copilot builds it, from desktop widgets to dashboards and internal apps you can share with your team. It uses the same technology as GitHub Copilot and runs on a new Copilot Managed Runtime, which hosts the apps safely inside a company’s own Microsoft 365 environment, under IT’s control. Microsoft says learning to build these small tools “is becoming as basic a skill as writing a memo or modeling a budget.”
  • Autopilot: a persistent agent that works in the background (more below).
  • Office in Copilot: the full Word, Excel and PowerPoint are now built in, so Copilot creates real, editable files your whole team can work on live.
  • Coming next: Today, a “proactive, personalized command center” across mail, calendar, Teams and tasks that drafts replies and proposes schedule changes before you ask, enters private preview in October. And @Copilot in Teams will join channels and meetings with the whole team’s context, in private preview by the end of the month.

Autopilot: an AI agent with a job title

Autopilot, which was previously known as Scout, is the headline feature. Instead of waiting for a prompt, it’s given a standing assignment. Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work, explains how it works in the announcement:

Give it a name, a role and a goal, and it goes to work, watching channels, following up on threads, running recurring work and picking a project back up days later.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft

Microsoft’s example: Autopilot can run an entire supplier review, building the schedule, handling prep, meetings and follow-ups, and chasing people for updates on its own. Because it’s hosted in the cloud, “it keeps working while you sleep.” Each Autopilot has its own identity, memory, computer and workspace inside the company’s systems, and turns up where people already work, so colleagues can @mention it in Teams or Outlook like a coworker, with permissions and audit logs behind it. It can even have a customisable avatar, Gizmodo reports.

What it costs, and who can get it

Microsoft is splitting Copilot’s pricing in two. Everyday features, Copilot in Chat and across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, stay on a fixed per-user licence. The heavier agent features, Cowork, Code and Autopilot, plus access to top frontier models such as Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s Astra, move to usage-based billing, so companies pay more the more work the agents do. On the flat-rate plan, a feature called Auto picks the best model for each request, weighing accuracy, speed and cost.

To stop bills spiralling, Microsoft is adding “FinOps for AI” controls: admins can set spending policies, decide which models different teams can use and approve extra credit requests, and employees can see their own usage and remaining balance inside Copilot.

It’s arriving in stages:

  • Home rolls out to Microsoft’s Frontier early-access programme in the coming weeks.
  • Code reaches Frontier at the end of the month, with broad availability in the following weeks, and a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
  • Autopilot and @Copilot in Teams go into private preview at the end of September, and Today in October.
  • Microsoft promises more at its Ignite conference, November 17 to 20 in San Francisco.

Why Microsoft needs this to work

Copilot has been a hard sell. Fewer than 7% of the more than 450 million commercial Office seats pay for Microsoft’s AI add-ons, The Next Web notes, and this week Microsoft was reported to be offering big customers discounts of up to 50% timed with this launch. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing their own agents straight into the workplace.

By building Office, coding and autonomous agents into one app, and letting customers pick rival companies’ models inside it, Microsoft is trying to make Copilot the place where work happens, whichever AI does it.

Why it matters

This is the clearest sign yet that the AI race has moved from chatbots to agents that do real work unsupervised. Microsoft has the biggest foothold in the office of any tech company, and if Autopilot catches on, millions of workers could soon have an AI colleague that never logs off.

Sources: Microsoft, Satya Nadella on X, The Next Web, Gizmodo

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