ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft now has a single Copilot client for consumers and business.
- Today’s new Copilot client release adds Code and Autopilot tabs.
- The cost model is “evolving,” with usage-based billing for key features.
For the past few years, Microsoft’s Copilot client lineup has been a fragmented mess, with its consumer chatbot and its enterprise-focused AI tools sharing a brand name while sporting wildly different interfaces and feature sets.
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Last month, the company began rolling out a single app designed to serve both groups, starting with mobile platforms and now targeting desktop environments. Starting today, that unified app, called simply Copilot, is getting a major upgrade.
Make no mistake: the new Copilot was engineered for Microsoft’s enterprise customers, not for consumers. Its feature set is geared for organizations that are already heavily invested in the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem, centered on Outlook, Teams, and documents created using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They also want those AI tools to work on company data in a secure environment they control, without the risk of sending it off to someone else’s cloud.
In pre-recorded remarks at a small launch event for key customers, Copilot Executive VP Jacob Andreou argued that Microsoft’s consumer base is “a little bit special.” He pointed out that roughly 90 million customers pay for Microsoft 365 out of their own pockets: “These folks don’t want some kind of dumbed-down consumer product; they want the full power that we offer to enterprise users, but in the context of their personal life.”
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And the user experience isn’t the only thing that’s different about the new Copilot. “In the last few months,” Andreou noted, “Copilot has gotten actually really good. It’s faster, it’s more capable, it’s more coherent and unified than ever before. … And users have really noticed.”
(I haven’t had any hands-on experience with these new apps. As always, what’s delivered might not live up to the promises in today’s announcements.)
Here’s what Microsoft says consumers and enterprise customers will be seeing, starting today.
What’s in the new Copilot app?
The new Copilot sports a design with three tabs: Home, Code, and Autopilot. The user interface is the same, whether you sign in with a personal or work account. The big difference with a work account is that those tools and agents have secure, compliant access via the Work IQ APIs to the massive amounts of data those companies are storing in Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Dynamics 365, and other repositories in their Microsoft-hosted enterprise cloud.
Home
The Home tab combines functions that used to be on separate Chat and Cowork tabs. Chat is the familiar conversational mode of interaction, designed to generate a document draft or look up answers; Cowork is the agentic side of the app, intended to complete a task from start to finish.
In a post announcing the new Copilot, Chief Marketing Officer Jared Spataro highlighted another new feature: Office in Copilot. Instead of switching apps, you can ask Copilot to create a launch plan in Word or a budget in Excel, and you’ll get “a real, editable document, workbook, or presentation,” available for editing and collaboration in the Copilot app, alongside the conversation.
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One feature that won’t be available right away on the Home tab is a Today view, which Microsoft says will be a “proactive, personalized command center across mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings, and tasks. It shows you what you missed, what needs attention now, and what can wait.” That feature enters private preview in October in Copilot, and will also come to Outlook and Teams.
Code
The demand for AI tools that can help you vibe code your way into the Fortune 500 shows no sign of slowing down soon. Microsoft says the Code feature is “powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot [and] runs in a sandboxed environment” that’s hosted securely in the Microsoft 365 tenant.
That’s a sharp contrast to how the leading player in the AI code-generating space, Anthropic’s Claude Code, operates. That product runs locally, inside isolated environments like containers or virtual machines. Microsoft’s cloud-based architecture is designed to appeal to customers in regulated industries who are uneasy about compliance and governance issues when data leaves the centrally managed cloud and moves onto local workstations.
Code is designed to build apps, trackers, dashboards, and automations that are based on prompts, and the resulting apps run directly in Copilot, using a new platform called the Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, which is managed as part of the Microsoft 365 tenant. The company said it plans to offer access to third-party tooling and allow professional developers to use that platform as well.
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The Code feature is rolling out to Microsoft’s frontier customers shortly, with broad availability “in the coming weeks.” Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers will have access later this year.
Autopilot
This feature, previously called Scout, is Microsoft’s entry in the long-running autonomous agent space. These agents are powerful and flexible. They’re also, as Andreou notes, “absolutely terrifying to an IT admin or somebody who’s trying to maintain a business posture.”
For Microsoft, the solution is to build an agent that’s a “digital teammate,” with its own memory, its own computer, and its own Outlook and Teams accounts, all managed by IT with permissions and an audit trail, just like any other employee. The biggest difference is that it doesn’t sleep.
Screenshot by MicrosoftHow much will all this cost?
“We’re evolving Copilot pricing,” Microsoft said as part of today’s announcement. Those words are guaranteed to cause heartburn for anyone responsible for P&L in a large enterprise.
The new Copilot uses two financial models. A user subscription license (USL) gives customers access to Copilot’s chat-based features, integrations with Office apps, and model selection, all for a fixed monthly price. Anything involving agents, on the other hand, requires usage-based billing (UBB). Cowork, Code, and Autopilot, as well as the new long-running agentic features, all require UBB.
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You don’t have to worry about any unpleasant surprises initially. Usage-based billing services are off by default, and administrators will be able to define spending policies and spending limits as part of the deployment of new Copilot services.
In a separate announcement today, Microsoft detailed a range of Agent 365 tools for managing costs and measuring benefits, all grouped under the FinOps for AI umbrella. Admins will be able to get detailed spending reports, and end users can monitor credit usage and check remaining credits directly in Copilot.
But the real answer to the big questions — how much will this all cost, and how much payoff will enterprise customers really see? — is pretty simple: no one knows.
Not even Copilot.
