Microsoft on Friday morning unveiled its long-promised Copilot “super app” — without officially calling it that — combining AI chat, coding and long-running agents into a unified app for business and personal use.
The new version of the Copilot app adds sections called Home, which combines chat with Microsoft’s Cowork agent; Code, which lets people build their own apps and tools by describing them; and Autopilot, where people can set up their own always-on AI agents.
It also brings full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside Copilot, so people can create and edit documents with AI and their co-workers without switching apps.
The announcement is Microsoft’s answer to OpenAI and Anthropic, which have been combining chat, coding and agents in their own apps and selling them directly to businesses that have long been Microsoft’s core customers. Microsoft also uses models from both companies in Copilot, alongside its own.
Partners and rivals: Microsoft executives contrasted the company’s approach with OpenAI and Anthropic during an event Wednesday, according to a transcript provided by Microsoft. The pitch is aimed at corporate IT departments, which have long relied on Microsoft for security and compliance.
Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president who leads Copilot, said Microsoft knew that “unlike a lot of our competition, sending your most sensitive files down to a local machine into a VM was a complete nonstarter” — an apparent reference to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, which runs in a virtual machine on the user’s computer.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pitched Copilot as a hedge against relying on any one AI lab, saying companies should be able to test models against their own benchmarks and swap one out for another.
“My test of true independence going forward is for you to have a private eval that you can hill climb on and substitute a model,” he said. Translation: a “private eval” is a company’s own set of tests for AI models, and “hill climb” is a phrase in vogue in AI circles for steadily improving results against those tests.
A company that can’t do those things, he added, has effectively handed the knowledge it builds with AI “to somebody else.”
Model choice: Microsoft also emphasized the ability to switch between AI models from different companies. A menu shown during the presentation let users pick OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Opus, or an Auto mode that chooses a model for each request.
Microsoft also showed its own MAI models alongside OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI on one of Nadella’s slides, although they weren’t listed in the menu shown during the demo.
The rollout: Nadella first promised the super app at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in June, saying that “come summer” the company would bring “coding to all knowledge work within one Copilot super app.” On Microsoft’s July 29 earnings call, he told investors it would arrive “this quarter,” which ends Sept. 30.
Friday’s announcement meets that deadline with less than a week to spare, and most of the new features won’t be widely available until later.
- Code, already in the hands of a few customers in Microsoft’s Frontier early-access program, rolls out more widely to the program at the end of the month, with broad availability in the coming weeks and a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
- Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. Office in Copilot will roll out to consumers and Frontier customers in the coming weeks.
Office inside Copilot: Copilot has long run inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now the full apps also run inside Copilot. “This is not just some simplified viewer,” Andreou said.
In a demo, a Microsoft product manager had Copilot pull data into an Excel workbook, accepted her team’s tracked changes in a Word document, and then had Copilot turn both into a PowerPoint deck without leaving the app. Co-workers can edit the same files at the same time from the regular Office apps, according to Microsoft.
How it’s priced: Copilot now has two ways to pay. A per-user monthly license covers everyday uses such as chat and Copilot features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. More intensive agent work, including Cowork, Code and Autopilot, is billed based on usage, as are the newest frontier models, OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Claude Fable.
“Our view is that there are two kinds of AI at work,” said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work, in a recorded briefing for media. “They call for two very different ways of paying, and Copilot offers both.”
Consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions will also add usage-based billing later this year for Cowork, Code and other new features, Spataro said.
Nadella told investors in July that Microsoft is evolving its business model “beyond per-seat to per-seat-plus-consumption.” Usage-based services are off by default, and administrators can set spending limits for an entire company, specific groups or individual users through Microsoft’s Agent 365 management tools.
From OpenClaw to Autopilot: Autopilot grew out of Microsoft’s experiments with OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent that went viral earlier this year. In March, Nadella described OpenClaw as a security risk akin to “a virus.”
By June, Microsoft had introduced Scout, an always-on personal agent for work that it called the first of its Autopilots. Nadella told investors in July that the agent was “powered by OpenClaw.” The new Copilot drops the Scout name, and people instead create and name their own Autopilots.
In his presentation this week, Andreou pitched Autopilot as the answer to the concerns that have kept agents like OpenClaw out of big companies.
“The hallmark of an amazing, long-running agent is autonomy and flexibility,” he said. “That is the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin.”
Each Autopilot runs in the cloud inside a company’s Microsoft 365 environment, with its own identity, memory and email address, and people can tag it in Teams or Outlook like a co-worker.
In a demo, a Microsoft employee playing the role of a regional manager at a retail chain gave his Autopilot, named Dot, one goal: make sure stores had inventory in time for Black Friday. It chose which Teams channels, email threads and inventory data to monitor, sent him a daily summary, and flagged a shipment problem that could affect 18 stores.
The adoption question: Microsoft reported more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats in July, up from 20 million in April. That’s still only about 7% of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats the company reported in January.
The new Copilot comes three weeks after Microsoft reorganized its financial reporting around a similar idea, creating a segment called Agents and Infra and moving GitHub’s cloud revenue into its Microsoft 365 business.
“It’s no longer about building or selling one app or service, but about connecting the entire trajectory of a ‘job to be done,'” Nadella wrote in a note to investors about the change at the time.
Microsoft 365 cloud revenue, which covers business and consumer subscriptions including Copilot and now GitHub, reached $100.3 billion in fiscal 2026 under the new structure, up about 19%. Microsoft doesn’t disclose how much of that comes from Copilot.
“None of these things really matter unless they actually go to work inside of your companies and deliver real value,” Andreou said.
Microsoft plans to share more at its Ignite conference, Nov. 17-20 in San Francisco.
