Microsoft announced it has made Copilot Cowork generally available, giving Microsoft 365 Copilot agentic capabilities that let it plan and carry out multistep work across the tools customers already use.
First introduced in March as a research preview, Cowork can gather context, select tools and return completed files or other deliverables. It uses Work IQ, the context layer connecting Copilot to an organization’s Microsoft 365 data, to draw on emails, meetings, documents and business information while respecting existing permissions.
Because Cowork runs in the cloud, tasks can continue after a user leaves the application or turns off their computer. Microsoft has also added plugins for services including Miro, Moody’s and Morningstar, with other services like Atlassian and Databricks coming soon. A browser feature that lets Cowork interact with websites through a user’s local Edge browser remains in preview.
As Cowork moves into general availability, Microsoft is giving administrators more control over access and spending. Cowork is disabled by default, and administrators can determine who can use it, impose spending limits and monitor activity. Prompts, responses and generated files also remain subject to existing Microsoft 365 compliance and data governance policies.
Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, but its use is metered separately through Copilot Credits. Tasks consume credits based on model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime, with pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.01 per credit. Cowork currently supports Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 models, while GPT-5.5 is available through Microsoft’s Frontier early access program. Microsoft also plans to add its own Cowork 1 model.
Microsoft’s release comes as OpenAI, its longtime partner and direct rival in workplace AI, is making a similar push into business workflows. The companies remain closely linked through their cloud and model partnership, but their business products increasingly overlap as both companies add agentic tools that can complete multistep workplace tasks, not just answer questions.
OpenAI recently updated ChatGPT Business, its shared AI workspace for teams. ChatGPT for PowerPoint is now available globally in beta, allowing users to build presentations from source material, revise slides and identify unclear or missing information. The slides remain editable in PowerPoint, although OpenAI advises users to check formatting, claims and figures before sharing.
Companies can now use an API to start ChatGPT workspace agents from internal systems, scheduled jobs or support tools, allowing the same instructions and connected context to be reused across recurring workflows. However, the API only queues the task and does not return a run identifier or the agent’s response, so external systems cannot yet track the run or automatically process its output.
OpenAI is also extending Codex into business work beyond coding. New role-specific plugins support data analytics, creative production, sales, product design, public equity investing and investment banking. Eligible customers can also preview Sites, which lets teams create and share hosted internal websites and applications. Annotations allow users to request targeted changes to specific parts of documents, spreadsheets, slides and sites.
Microsoft and OpenAI remain closely connected, but these releases show them competing more directly over the tools, workflows and business context that shape how knowledge work gets done.
