Copilot Cowork

Most of Microsoft Copilot helps you produce something: a draft, a summary, a chart. Copilot Cowork carries out multi-step work on your behalf across Microsoft 365, and asks for your approval before important actions.

Microsoft announced general availability of Copilot Cowork for work and school accounts on 16 June 2026.

1. What Cowork can do

According to Microsoft Learn, Cowork can:

• Draft, reply to and send emails, and sort your inbox.
• Schedule meetings and manage your calendar.
• Create Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and PDFs, and edit existing Office files in OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Post in Teams channels and chats.
• Search your organisation and carry out deep research.
• Prepare daily briefings and meeting preparation.
• Run prompts on a schedule, and run tasks when a matching email or Teams message arrives.

It shows each step as it works, and you can interrupt, steer, pause or cancel.

2. How a Cowork session works

1. Describe the task, and attach files if useful.
2. Watch the steps. Cowork breaks the work down and loads the skills it needs (for example Word, Excel, Email, Calendar Management, Deep Research).
3. Steer. Add context or correct course at any point.
4. Approve. Before sensitive actions such as sending or posting, Cowork pauses for approval and shows a risk level for medium and high risk actions.
5. Review the result and ask for changes.

Prepare me for Thursday's quarterly review with [client]. Pull together what has been agreed by email and in meetings since July, list open actions with owners, draft a one-page agenda in Word, and draft (do not send) an email to the internal team with the agenda attached.

Every Monday at 8am, give me a briefing of this week's external meetings, the latest relevant emails for each, and anything I promised to send.

3. Where you can use it

In the browser at copilot.cloud.microsoft, in the Microsoft Copilot desktop app for Windows and macOS, and in the mobile app.

4. What it needs

• The Microsoft 365 Copilot licence for each user.
• Usage-based billing switched on by an admin. Cowork is billed in Copilot Credits based on the work each task does (model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime).
• A spending policy that includes the user and selects Cowork. Microsoft is explicit: the policy is an access control as well as a budget, and Cowork is off by default.

Admins can also control browser use in Microsoft Edge, which models are available (including turning off the Anthropic model family) and which plugins can be used.

5. Governance points for regulated teams

• Automated tasks run with the creating user's permissions, ask for approval before sending or posting by default, and are recorded in the unified audit log.
• Microsoft Purview controls apply to Cowork, and it follows the same data residency model as Microsoft Copilot.
• Cowork offers a choice of models, including Anthropic models. Microsoft notes that Anthropic models are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary and in-country processing commitments. Legal and finance teams should confirm with IT which models are enabled.

6. Cowork, agents or flows?