Copilot Cowork, and when to hand over a whole task

Cowork is the part of Microsoft 365 Copilot you give a whole job to rather than a question. Microsoft made it generally available worldwide on 16 June 2026, and it is the first Copilot feature most organisations will meet that charges for each task it runs, on top of the per-person licence you already pay for. Understand the billing before the capability, because the billing is what decides which work is worth handing over.

What it does that Copilot chat does not

Chat answers, then stops. Cowork takes an outcome, writes a plan, and works through it, calling tools and reading your material as it goes. Microsoft describes it as executing “complex, long-running, multi-tool tasks” and says that instead of handing back a suggestion it “runs it end-to-end and returns a completed result”.

To reach it, open the Microsoft Copilot app with your work account and switch from Chat to Cowork. It is on the web at copilot.cloud.microsoft and in the desktop and mobile apps.

Four consequences of that design matter before you start. The work runs in Microsoft’s cloud rather than on your machine, so a long job carries on with your laptop shut. It selects its own model for each step: it launched on Anthropic’s models, and in September 2026 Microsoft added Claude Fable 5.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra. It can drive a browser through Edge, which is how it reaches systems that offer no other way in. And it pauses at checkpoints to ask before anything sensitive happens, which is the only thing standing between a misread instruction and a sent email.

What comes out is not confined to chat text. Cowork writes Word documents, edits spreadsheets and builds PowerPoint decks, schedules meetings, posts in Teams, and Microsoft says early users have had it produce full web pages. Since August 2026 it also makes and edits images, using what Microsoft calls OpenAI’s “ChatGPT Images 2.0”. It no longer has to wait to be asked, either: you can schedule a prompt to run on a timetable, or set a task to start when a particular email or Teams message arrives. It reads across email, meetings, files and business systems through Work IQ, Microsoft’s name for the layer that gives it that reach, with plugins into Dynamics 365, Fabric and outside products including Harvey, Miro, monday.com and S&P Global Energy.

The work it suits

Microsoft’s own general-availability examples are the clearest signal of the shape. One analysis compared nearly 4,000 files across product versions, “work that would have taken weeks”. Sales leadership had it surface stalled pipeline opportunities with specific follow-ups, “collapsing a week of manual review into a single morning”.

The pattern is jobs with many steps, more than one system, and a document at the end. Preparing for a client meeting out of last quarter’s notes and this quarter’s numbers. Comparing a folder of tender responses against a requirement list. That last one overlaps with Notebooks, and the split is clean: a Notebook answers your questions from sources you picked, Cowork goes away and produces the comparison document. Where a single good prompt in ordinary chat would have done the job, use ordinary chat. That is already paid for.

What it costs

Cowork needs the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence first. Usage is then billed on top, in Copilot Credits, which Microsoft prices at “$0.01 per Copilot Credit” on pay-as-you-go. The same credits are sold prepaid in packs of 25,000 for $200 a month, and Microsoft advertises up to 20% off for buying credits up front. A cheaper route is promised rather than delivered: Microsoft said in June that its own tuned model, Cowork 1, would arrive “in the coming weeks”, and its roadmap still lists it as coming as of 26 September.

What any given task costs depends on “model use, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime”. Microsoft sorts jobs into light, medium and heavy, and its June launch post offered a spreadsheet for estimating a whole organisation’s spend from that mix. A single task’s price is only known once it runs: Cowork shows you the cost in credits as it goes. That is the awkward part of the model, and it means budgeting by cap rather than by estimate. Administrators get spending limits for the whole organisation, for a group and for one person, plus usage alerts and reporting by user and feature. Cowork is off by default, which is the right way round. If it shows up in your app but will not run, you can request access from inside it, and the request goes to your administrator.

Every other Copilot feature is covered by the licence you have already bought. Cowork is the one where using it more costs more, so set the organisation-wide spending limit before you switch it on for anybody.

Where I would start

Research and drafting, where a wrong answer is obvious the moment you read it. Hold back the actions that leave your organisation, sending mail and posting into Teams, until you have watched several tasks run end to end. Checkpoints only protect you while people still read them, and the fourth identical approval prompt of the morning gets clicked through unread. Each approval now carries an option to skip future prompts for similar actions. Leave it alone until you have seen that kind of action go right many times over, because it switches off the one safeguard between Cowork and your outbox.

The data questions Cowork raises are the ones the rest of Copilot raises, answered in where Copilot sends your data. For how it sits alongside Copilot Studio and the agent builders, see Copilot agents at work.