Microsoft on Friday unveiled a revamped Copilot app with a coding tool, an always-on AI agent and its Office apps built in, as it tries to turn its AI assistant into a one-stop shop for office workers, Reuters reported.
The new tool, called Code, lets users build apps, dashboards and other software from natural language prompts and runs on the same technology as GitHub Copilot, Reuters said. In its official blog post, Microsoft said Code runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted inside a company’s own tenant, with finished apps shareable across teams.
Autopilot is a revamp of the Scout agent Microsoft unveiled in June and will carry its own identity in the company directory, with permissions users can control, Reuters said. Microsoft said users give Autopilot a name, a role and a goal, and it works in Teams, Outlook and documents, following up on threads and running recurring tasks while cloud-hosted, so it keeps working when the user is away.
“I think it’s been very hard for many organizations to bring agents into the enterprise because of security, compliance and governance concerns,” Annie Pearl, corporate vice president of Copilot Product, told Reuters.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint now run directly inside Copilot, both Reuters and Microsoft said, and Microsoft said a new Home tab combines Chat with Cowork, its tool for tasks users delegate end to end. Reuters said Microsoft also added cost-management tools that show employees the costs tied to their AI usage. Microsoft said users can view credit usage, remaining balances and usage history in the app.
Pricing is shifting too. CNBC reported that customers will pay for Cowork, Code and Autopilot based on usage, rather than through a subscription like the $30 per user per month commercial Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Autopilot enters private preview at the end of September, all three sources said. Reuters said Code reaches early-access customers at the end of the month, while CNBC said companies in Microsoft’s Frontier early-access program get the Home and Code tabs in the coming weeks. Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers can preview Code later this year.
The revamp targets a slow start. CNBC said fewer than 7% of more than 450 million commercial Office 365 seats have Copilot licenses, as Anthropic gains traction in enterprise AI. Jacob Andreou, Microsoft’s executive vice president for Copilot, acknowledged to CNBC that adding coding to the app is an instance of Microsoft playing catch-up.