Microsoft's new Copilot works as you sleep⁠.

Microsoft has unveiled a redesigned Copilot app with three capabilities in one place: Home, Code and Autopilot.¹ Home joins Copilot Chat with Cowork, the mode for work you hand over and get back finished, and puts Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside the app.¹ The Verge reports that Microsoft is comparing the new app to how influential Office was on productivity.²

Autopilot is the renamed Scout, the assistant Microsoft showed at Build earlier this year.² Microsoft describes it as a persistent agent that keeps working when you are not, watching channels, following up threads and running recurring work without waiting for a prompt.¹ It lives in the customer's own tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, and colleagues can @mention it in Teams and Outlook, with permissions, audit and governance behind it.¹ Microsoft's own example is an agent that runs a full supplier review, from the schedule to chasing stakeholders for updates.¹

Code lets staff who are not developers describe an app, tracker, dashboard or automation in plain language and have Copilot build it.¹ Microsoft says it runs in a sandbox, can be hosted inside the customer's tenant and uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot.¹ A new service, Copilot Managed Runtime, hosts that code inside a company's Microsoft 365 environment under IT control and is in preview now.¹

The pricing is the part that changes.² The standard user subscription licence covers Copilot in Chat and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.¹ Cowork, Code and Autopilot run on usage-based billing, as do frontier models such as Astra and Fable, and Microsoft is adding FinOps for AI tools to help manage the spend.¹ The Verge says IT administrators will need those tools to keep agent usage from getting out of control.²

The new app is not on general release yet.² Home and Code start rolling out to Microsoft's early access Frontier programme in the coming weeks, Autopilot goes into private preview at the end of the month, and Code reaches Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers in preview later this year.¹

What it means for your budget

For a firm that already runs on Microsoft 365, this agent arrives inside tools it already uses and already trusts. That is a real advantage. The awkward part is the bill. A seat licence is a number you can put in a budget. An agent that works through the night on usage-based billing is not, and Microsoft shipping spend controls on the same day tells you it knows. Microsoft has not given UK prices, and no British regulator has said anything about it.

An agent with its own identity and its own computer inside your tenant is also a new member of staff with no probation period. Before anyone switches Autopilot on, decide what it may touch, who reads its audit trail, and what monthly spend would make you turn it off. The early access timetable gives you a few weeks to settle those questions while someone else finds the rough edges.

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