2.3.2. Copilot Cowork at a Glance
💡 First Principle: Chat and agents hand you an output and stop. Cowork keeps going: it turns your request into steps, carries them out across your Microsoft 365 apps, and pauses for your approval before anything that affects other people. The shift is from "write me a draft" to "get this done, and check with me before you send."
Microsoft Copilot Cowork carries out tasks on your behalf. You describe what you need, and Cowork can send emails, schedule meetings, create documents, post in Teams and manage your calendar, and you approve each action before it happens. A Cowork task can run for minutes or hours.
Positioning facts to know now (details in 6.4):
- Status: generally available for work and school accounts (GA announced June 2026, after a period in the Frontier program). Cowork for personal accounts is in preview.
- Where: in the Microsoft Copilot app in a browser, the desktop app (Windows and macOS) and the mobile app. You open it from the toggle next to Chat at the top of Microsoft Copilot.
- Access: it requires a Microsoft Copilot (formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot) license plus usage-based billing, which an admin grants through a spending policy. It isn't included with no-cost Copilot Chat.
- What makes it different: it is an agentic system that loads skills for each type of task, works through a visible plan, and asks for approvals.
⚠️ Exam Trap: Cowork isn't "Copilot Chat with more time." A licensed user who hasn't been granted usage-based billing can't use Cowork, and a Copilot Chat user without the license can't use it at all. Neither the license alone nor the spending policy alone is the whole answer: both are needed.
Reflection Question: A manager wants Copilot to find everyone who missed last week's kickoff, send each of them the recording link with a short personal note, and book a 15-minute catch-up with each. Why is this a Cowork task rather than a chat or Researcher task, and what will the manager be asked to do while it runs?
