Most workdays don’t fall apart because employees lack ideas. Instead, challenges arise between intention and execution. What employees need is a way to set executional engines in motion so they can focus on higher-level work, stepping in only when necessary.
At Microsoft, we’ve been working to close that gap with a new kind of agent: Copilot Cowork. Rather than a strict instruction-and-response approach, Cowork has taken the leap to multi-step action across an employee’s Microsoft 365 environment.
From task assistants to true digital coworkers
For years, the promise of AI at work has centered on task assistance, like creating drafts quickly, delivering better summaries, and providing faster answers. But knowledge retrieval isn’t partnership.
“Cowork really sheds light on the art of the possible when it comes to agents, without the need for employees to build them for themselves. It has ignited people’s imagination around what agents can do.”
Stephan Kerametlian, senior director, Microsoft Digital
In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve been pursuing deeper impact for AI. We want agents to work alongside our employees, take on multi-step tasks, and produce real outputs, all while keeping the humans that direct their work in the loop.
Copilot Cowork represents that shift. It behaves less like a chatbot and more like a capable teammate that plans, executes, and checks in as it goes along.
“Cowork really sheds light on the art of the possible when it comes to agents, without the need for employees to build them for themselves,” says Stephan Kerametlian, a senior director in Microsoft Digital. “It has ignited people’s imagination around what agents can do, and it helps them understand that they don’t need to be a developer to get high-quality outputs very quickly.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot agents
Copilot Cowork is just one of the agents available through Copilot. Each is most effective in a specific set of scenarios.
Cowork carries out multi-step work across your Microsoft 365 apps and produces real deliverables on your behalf. Reach for it when a task spans multiple apps and needs actual outputs like drafts, decks, follow-ups, or scheduled work.
Researcher is a reasoning agent that runs complex, multi-step research across your work data and the web to deliver expert-level insights. Use it for go-to-market strategies, opportunity analysis, or comprehensive client briefings.
Analyst is a reasoning agent that thinks like a skilled data scientist, using chain-of-thought reasoning and Python to turn raw data into answers. Use it for demand forecasts, purchasing-pattern visualizations, or revenue projections.
Using Copilot Cowork to move from conversation to action
We created Copilot Cowork for workflows that span multiple steps, people, and applications. While traditional chat experiences answer questions or generate content, Cowork can interpret a request, create a plan, gather relevant context, and carry work forward over time.
“Work IQ packages relevance, ranking, and context into something AI can actually act on. It understands who you work with, what you’re working on, and which content matters in a given situation, helping the AI identify the right material and infer the steps needed to deliver an outcome.”
Swapna Malekar, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital
This agent can develop documents, coordinate meetings, generate research, create web applications, and manage ongoing tasks. It also provides visibility into its progress and requests approval before taking sensitive actions.
Key capabilities of Copilot Cowork
Multi-step plan execution
Handles entire workflows by breaking complex requests into steps across apps
Approval checkpoints
Allows for full oversight with approval before sensitive actions: pause, resume, or cancel anytime
Scheduled and recurring tasks
Automates regular workflows by running prompts on a schedule
Cloud-native execution
Enables continual progress in a sandboxed cloud environment when the employee’s device is unavailable
Built-in skills
Executes on common productivity and enterprise tasks across Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, including PDF document creation, editing, and formatting
Handles email, scheduling, and calendar and meeting management in Outlook and Teams
Offers support for up to 20 custom skills
Work IQ, Microsoft’s intelligence layer for enterprise context, is the foundation of these capabilities. It helps Cowork understand relevant files, meetings, chats, collaborators, and organizational signals so that the agent can identify the right information for the task at hand. Cowork then uses that context to determine the steps needed to deliver the requested outcome.
“Work IQ packages relevance, ranking, and context into something AI can actually act on,” says Swapna Malekar, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It understands who you work with, what you’re working on, and which content matters in a given situation, helping the AI identify the right material and infer the steps needed to deliver an outcome.”
Our employees are already using Cowork to tackle work that would otherwise require multiple prompts and applications. With a single request, they can create presentations, establish Teams chats for collaboration, schedule recurring follow-up activities, begin building strategy documents, and more.
Cowork can also pull together emails, chats, documents, and news sources into a briefing or transform existing content into an interactive web experience. Throughout the process, employees can refine the work, answer clarifying questions, and approve actions before Cowork moves forward.
Helping employees embrace this watershed moment
During early adoption efforts for Cowork, we learned that successful usage depends as much on behavior change as on technology. Employees who approached Cowork simply as a better chatbot often saw incremental gains.
“Cowork introduces a new way of thinking about work, where you hand off a complex task, close your computer, and the work continues on your behalf. For adoption specialists, the goal is to help employees recognize where that capability fits naturally into their day.”
Petra Glattbach, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital
People who learned to think in terms of outcomes uncovered far more value. Instead of asking for a draft, they delegated a process. Instead of requesting a summary, they assigned a research task with a defined deliverable.
Agent Launchpad is an instructional program we’ve designed to develop our employees’ agentic AI skills. This effort, alongside other readiness resources, is encouraging people to identify recurring workflows, experiment with multi-step requests, and refine their collaboration techniques over time.
“Cowork introduces a new way of thinking about work, where you hand off a complex task, close your computer, and the work continues on your behalf,” says Petra Glattbach, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital. “For adoption specialists, the goal is to help employees recognize where that capability fits naturally into their day.”
This process isn’t about replacing existing ways of working overnight. It’s helping employees recognize where a digital coworker can reduce manual effort, accelerate execution, and create more time for higher-value work.
Boosting our role as Customer Zero with Cowork
Based on our experience as Customer Zero, the most effective Cowork users start with a real business problem and then explore how an agent can help solve it to drive core business outcomes.
For Jody Ryan, principal cloud solution architect for Microsoft 365 Copilot AI Business Solutions, Cowork quickly became part of her daily workflow. She’s used it to build interactive HTML experiences, create adoption sites, and rapidly prototype customer-facing concepts during live conversations.
“Cowork has become a powerful partner in my day-to-day work, helping me turn information into action so I can be more present, proactive, and impactful with my customers.”
Jody Ryan, principal cloud solution architect, Microsoft 365 Copilot AI Business Solutions
In one scenario, Cowork helped her transform a customer discussion into a working web prototype that she refined in real time based on live feedback. Going from whiteboarding to prototype to Agent was a natural progression that helped her customers visualize the real impact of Microsoft’s agentic capabilities.
One of the greatest surprises for Ryan was how much she enjoyed the customizable approach to human-in-the-loop approval checkpoints. For example, Cowork will find a time for a meeting, build a deck, and draft the invite email, but then pause for her review before sending it out. It’s all about identifying patterns of work and enabling Cowork to be part of them.
“Cowork has become a powerful partner in my day-to-day work, helping me turn information into action so I can be more present, proactive, and impactful with my customers,” Ryan says.
Employees in all kinds of roles across Microsoft are echoing Ryan’s experience. People are feeling the genuine evolution that agents like Cowork represent.
The skills we’ve learned over the last three years have been leading to this moment. By demonstrating the tangible impacts of AI through adoption initiatives, celebrating wins, and setting employees free to explore and create AI solutions to business challenges, we’ve positioned ourselves to capitalize on this next leap into more advanced AI tools.
One of our most important lessons has been that cultivating an AI-ready workforce throughout our Frontier Transformation journey has built a sense of confidence and capability with AI. Now that true agentic partnership is a possibility, that journey has prepared our people to get the most value out of tools like this.
The next chapter in the agentic workplace
The response to Copilot Cowork within Microsoft has taken us through an inflection point where AI has moved beyond assistance and into genuine execution. Our internal adoption efforts clearly demonstrate that shift.
“When agents can reason over organizational knowledge and then take action on our behalf, they become a powerful force for productivity and a critical aspect of how we lead Frontier Transformation.”
Brian Fielder, vice president, Microsoft Digital
Within three weeks of its internal release, Cowork had 20,000 users. Employees are actively exploring new ways to use the agent, from streamlining meeting preparation and follow-up work to creating content, conducting research, and managing complex projects.
We’ve learned that different teams often have different uses for different agents. But Cowork is emerging as a tool that can accommodate efforts reaching across a wide array of apps, data sources, workflows, and scenarios.
That’s a big shift, and employees are excited. Interest has been so strong that we’re expanding our enablement efforts, including new, Cowork-focused learning experiences within Agent Launchpad.
As we continue to evaluate Cowork, product feedback is helping us improve reliability, strengthen connections to enterprise data and external systems, and refine the quality of outputs. Even though it’s still in the early stages, teams are finding that Cowork can reduce administrative burden and help work move faster.
“Work IQ is helping unlock a new era where AI can understand the context behind our work, not just the content,” says Brian Fielder, vice president of Microsoft Digital. “When agents can reason over organizational knowledge and then take action on our behalf, they become a powerful force for productivity and a critical aspect of how we lead Frontier Transformation.”
For us at Microsoft, Cowork is more than a new agent. It’s providing a glimpse into a new future of work, where digital coworkers help employees focus more of their time on the aspects of their job that matter most.
Key takeaways
Here are some things to consider as you prepare your organization to make the most of Copilot Cowork:
Start with the work, not the technology. The most successful AI adoption happens when employees apply agents to real business challenges, recurring tasks, and daily workflows. Cowork becomes most valuable when people connect its capabilities to their own work context.
Think in outcomes, not prompts. Multi-step agents introduce a new way of working. Instead of asking AI to complete one task at a time, employees can delegate an entire process and then collaborate with the agent as work progresses.
Learn from others. Social learning accelerates adoption. Sharing examples, use cases, and lessons learned helps employees discover new possibilities and build confidence using agentic AI in their own roles.
Keep a human in the loop. Approval checkpoints, visibility into progress, and ongoing guidance enable employees to delegate work while maintaining accountability and trust.
Context drives better outcomes. Work IQ helps agents understand the relationships between people, content, meetings, conversations, and organizational knowledge, allowing for more relevant actions and results.
Experiment continuously. AI capabilities are evolving rapidly. Rather than trying to keep up with every new development, regularly revisit the tools available and look for new opportunities to apply them to your work.
Treat agents as coworkers, not tools. The greatest gains come when employees view agents as collaborators that can take ownership of meaningful work, freeing people up to focus on judgment, creativity, and decision making.
Try it out
Ready to try Copilot Cowork? You can access the agent through the Microsoft Frontier program. Start today.
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