Microsoft Unveils the New Copilot with Home, Code, and Autopilot, Plus Office Inside Copilot

Microsoft has introduced “the new Copilot,” a sweeping redesign of Microsoft 365 Copilot built around three new capabilities: Home, Code, and Autopilot. Announced by Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s CMO for AI at Work, the update turns the Copilot app into a single place to ask, delegate, build, and automate work. It also brings Word, Excel, and PowerPoint directly into Copilot.

Details

• Home: The new starting point in Copilot, combining Chat (quick questions and drafts) and Cowork (delegated multi-step tasks such as RFP responses) in one place, with recent activity and suggested tasks. Copilot will soon route requests to Chat, Cowork, or Code automatically
• Office in Copilot: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents can be created and edited inside Copilot as real, editable files that sync with the Office apps. Teammates can be @mentioned, PowerPoint can apply custom templates, and Excel explains what changed and why. Skills add domain expertise, such as finance in Excel and legal in Word
• Code: Lets anyone build apps, trackers, dashboards, desktop widgets, and automations from natural language. It is built on the same technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandbox, and can be hosted inside the company’s tenant
• Copilot Managed Runtime: New IT-governed hosting that runs apps built in Cowork, Code, and Copilot Studio inside the Microsoft 365 environment. It is in preview now
• Autopilot: The agent formerly called “Scout,” now a persistent, proactive agent with its own name, role, goal, identity, memory, and cloud computer. It can watch channels, follow up on threads, run recurring work, and resume projects days later in Teams, Outlook, and documents
• Sneak peeks: “Today,” a proactive command center spanning mail, calendar, Teams, meetings, and tasks, enters private preview in October. “@Copilot in Teams” gives everyone in a channel, chat, or meeting shared context and permissions
• Business context: Fabric IQ, which draws on more than 20 million Power BI semantic models, is generally available in Chat and Cowork. Dynamics 365 and Power Platform grounding is entering public preview, and a unified plugin registry managed by IT is rolling out
• New pricing model: A fixed per-user subscription license (USL) covers Chat, Copilot in the Office apps, and “Auto” model routing. Cowork, Code, Autopilot, and frontier models (named as “Astra” and “Fable”) are billed by usage. New FinOps controls let admins cap spending and restrict model families by user group
• Rollout: Home and Code are rolling out to the Frontier program in the coming weeks, and Autopilot enters private preview at the end of September. Code for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro consumer plans arrives in preview later this year

What happened next

The announcement builds on a September 23 letter from Spataro that outlined the shift to Copilot Credits and usage-based billing for agentic work. The usage-based split is a notable change from Copilot’s original flat $30-per-user model. Broader availability details are expected at Microsoft Ignite, November 17–20 in San Francisco. Code’s GitHub Copilot lineage also blurs the line between Microsoft’s work assistant and its developer tools, though Microsoft says developers will keep using GitHub Copilot for day-to-day coding.