Most of the facts come from Microsoft's September 25, 2026 announcement on the Official Microsoft Blog, written by Jared Spataro, and from Microsoft Learn documentation updated in late September and early October. Here is what is actually new, what you can use today, and what IT should check before users start delegating work to an agent that doesn't sleep.
One app, several ways of working
According to Microsoft, the redesigned Copilot app adds three main capabilities: Home, Code and Autopilot. Inside Home are two ways of working, Chat and Cowork. TechRepublic described the change as Copilot being rebuilt around three main areas: Home for everyday AI work, Code for building apps and automations, and Autopilot for persistent agents that can keep working without an active prompt.
Each part, as Microsoft describes it:
- Home is the new landing screen. You can see recent activity, get suggestions for what Copilot can help with, and pick up unfinished work.
- Chat is the quick, back-and-forth mode for questions, lookups and drafts.
- Cowork is for work you hand off. You describe the result you want and it runs the task from start to finish. Microsoft's examples include an RFP response, a launch kit, a customer briefing and a financial close package.
- Code builds apps, trackers, dashboards, automations and workflows from plain-language descriptions.
- Autopilot is a persistent agent that keeps working after you've closed the window.
Microsoft also says that "coming soon" you won't need to pick a mode. You'll state the goal and Copilot will send it to Chat, Cowork or Code. That's a promise, not a shipping feature, so for now you still choose the mode yourself.
Summary: This is one Copilot app with several working modes, not a set of separate products. Home is the front door, and the rest are different ways of getting work done.
Office in Copilot: the documents come to you
Home also includes Office in Copilot, which brings Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the Copilot experience. Microsoft says you can ask Copilot from Home to draft a launch brief, model a budget, build a deck or open a file your team is already working on. The result is a real, editable document, workbook or presentation that the whole team sees live. You can refine it next to the conversation or @mention a colleague, and Microsoft says changes stay in sync between Copilot and the desktop Office apps.
The announcement also lists improvements in the Office apps themselves. PowerPoint can keep decks on-brand automatically. Excel shows what changed and why when Copilot or a coworker edits a workbook. Role-specific "Skills" add expertise such as financial skills in Excel and legal skills in Word.
A reasonable caveat: this is Microsoft's own description. Nothing published so far shows that every file type, Office feature or tenant setup behaves this way at every rollout stage. Try it on real documents before you rely on it for real work.
Code: the "fourth unit" of knowledge work
Microsoft's case for Code is that knowledge work has been built around three file types (the document, the spreadsheet and the deck) and Code adds a fourth: small, purpose-built apps that anyone can make. Copilot picks an approach based on your description. The output can be a persistent desktop widget, an interactive dashboard or a cloud-hosted internal app you share with your team.
Under the hood, Microsoft states that Code is powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely within the organization's tenant. That doesn't make Code the same product as GitHub Copilot, and it doesn't mean the two share licensing or controls. Microsoft says professional developers will keep using GitHub Copilot day to day, with tighter links into the Copilot platform. This forum's own earlier coverage summed it up: Code sits alongside GitHub Copilot rather than replacing it.
About the timing: Microsoft's blog post gives two schedules for Code. One passage says Home and Code start rolling out to Frontier "in the coming weeks." Another says Code reaches Frontier at the end of the month with broad availability in the coming weeks, plus a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year. In practice, Code is still an early-access feature, and consumer subscribers are further back in the queue.
Copilot Managed Runtime: where the apps actually live
If anyone can build an app, someone has to host it, govern it and eventually retire it. Microsoft's answer is Copilot Managed Runtime. Microsoft Learn labels it a preview and calls the page prerelease documentation that is subject to change.
The Learn documentation describes three ways to create an app:
| Entry point | Intended audience | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Cowork | Business users | Ask for an app in a Cowork session (or use the App builder skill). Requires Frontier enrollment. |
| Copilot Studio | Makers who want more control | Turn on the Preview experience, select Apps, then describe the app or start from existing data |
| SDK and CLI | Professional developers | Use the ms CLI (@microsoft/managed-apps-cli) and the @microsoft/managed-apps SDK to scaffold, build and deploy |
All three produce the same thing: an app hosted by Microsoft that uses Microsoft Entra authentication and inherits the tenant's default governance policy, meaning approved connectors, sharing rules and content security policy. Admins see every Managed Runtime app across the tenant under Microsoft 365 admin center > Apps > All apps, whichever tool was used to build it. End users open their apps from a separate Managed Runtime portal, which sits apart from both the developer tools and the admin center.
Why it matters: this is the sensible answer to the obvious question, which is how to stop "shadow IT" from becoming "shadow IT with an AI assistant." People can build apps from three places, but every app ends up in one list that admins can see.
Autopilot: Scout gets a promotion
Autopilot is the renamed version of the agent previously called Scout. Microsoft describes it as a "persistent, proactive and personal" digital teammate. You give it a name, a role and a goal, and it watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks projects back up days later without waiting for a prompt. Microsoft's example is running a full supplier review: building the schedule, handling prep, meetings and follow-ups, and contacting stakeholders for updates.
Microsoft says Autopilot is cloud-hosted and lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. It's built on Microsoft IQ, and it appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents, where people can @mention it like a coworker. Permissions, auditing and governance apply to it.
An agent with its own identity raises an obvious question: who is responsible for what it does? The consultancy 2toLead recommends that IT teams draft an agent identity policy: owner, approver, permissions. Autopilot runs with its own identity, so every agent needs an accountable human owner. That's advice from one firm, not a Microsoft requirement. It's still a sensible starting point for anyone who will be answering to auditors later.
Timing: Microsoft's blog said Autopilot would expand to private preview "at the end of the month," which in a September 25 post means September. Some later coverage gives a different date. Apple Scoop wrote that Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of October. Microsoft's original wording points to September. Either way, it's private preview, not something you can switch on in your tenant today.
Today and @Copilot: separate features, not Autopilot
Two other announced features are easy to confuse with Autopilot:
- Today is a planned Home experience that summarizes mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks. Microsoft says it shows what needs attention and prepares work for you: drafts, proposed schedule changes and forgotten follow-ups. Microsoft said it enters private preview in October and will come to Outlook and Teams.
- @Copilot in Teams shares context and permissions across a whole channel, group chat or meeting. Microsoft said it would be in private preview by the end of the month.
Copilot Credits: where the bill comes in
This part of the webinar matters most to finance teams. Microsoft now splits Copilot spending into two models:
- User subscription license (USL): a fixed cost for "everyday AI," meaning Copilot Chat and Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with model selection and the Auto model router.
- Usage-based billing (UBB): metered in Copilot Credits. Microsoft says Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new long-running agent capabilities and frontier models (the blog names Astra and Fable) all run on UBB.
In short, as TechRepublic put it, the answer to whether the new Copilot costs extra is potentially. Technobezz noted that no price figures were disclosed for any of the new capabilities in the announcement.
Microsoft Learn calls Copilot Credits a common currency across eligible services. Organizations can pay through fixed licensing, the Copilot Credit Pre-purchase Plan (P3), pay-as-you-go billing, prepaid capacity packs, or supported combinations of these. The services currently listed under usage-based billing include Cowork (Copilot license required), advanced work in SharePoint and OneDrive (Copilot license required), the Work IQ API, Copilot Managed Runtime and Teams Phone Agent.
There's a billing detail for Managed Runtime that's easy to miss. Building an app uses credits under the spending policies of the product you build it with. Running the app can have its own spending policies and credit allocations, set in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the Copilot Managed Runtime service.
FinOps for AI: what admins can actually control
Microsoft Learn says the main controls are under Microsoft 365 admin center > Copilot > Cost management. From there, administrators can:
- Configure spending policies and choose which agents and services each one covers
- Control which users and groups can access supported services
- Set organization-level and user-level spending limits
- Configure policy alerts and user-level threshold notifications
- Manage billing methods and connect an Azure subscription
- Route credit requests to custom approvers
- Review consumption by spending policy, user, group, agent, service and funding source
Supported reader roles can view consumption reports without being able to change policies or billing. That lets finance or licensing staff see the numbers without getting access to the controls.
The September announcement adds more, still rolling out. Agent 365 cost management is expanding to cover Code and Copilot Managed Runtime, with agents built in Copilot Studio planned for October. Admins will get API access to spending policies, a way to send user credit requests into existing approval workflows, and controls over which model families each group can use. Those model controls also limit which models Auto can choose. Microsoft also says end users will be able to see their own credit usage, remaining balance and history inside Copilot.
The default that deserves a second look
According to Microsoft Learn, the Auto-apply new services setting is on by default for spending policies. When Microsoft adds a new supported agent or service, it automatically falls under your existing policies. Some organizations will want that. Others will want to review each new metered service before anyone can spend credits on it, and those admins can turn the setting off per policy.
An admin checklist before the rollout reaches you
This checklist is based on Microsoft's documentation and general enterprise practice:
- Find out who is in Frontier. Home, Code and Cowork-based app building reach Frontier users first.
- Audit your spending policies, especially the Auto-apply new services setting.
- Decide who approves credit requests and set up routing before users start asking for more.
- Review Managed Runtime governance defaults (connectors, sharing rules, content security policy), because every new app inherits them.
- Check Apps > All apps in the Microsoft 365 admin center regularly as people start building.
- Treat estimates as estimates. Microsoft notes that its Copilot Credit Estimator is for modeling only and doesn't guarantee final costs. A Cowork task that runs for an hour is not priced like a single chat prompt.
- Write an agent ownership policy before Autopilot leaves private preview, not after.
The bottom line
The redesign does make sense. Copilot is moving from answering questions to doing work: delegating tasks, building apps and running agents that keep going without supervision. Microsoft has also done more governance groundwork than usual for a launch at this stage. Centralized app inventory, tenant-inherited policies and detailed cost dashboards are what enterprises have been asking for.
There are reasons to be cautious too. Most of the strongest claims come from Microsoft's own marketing, and nobody has independent productivity data yet. The best features are in Frontier or private preview with no general release date. And moving agent work to metered credits means the bill now depends on how much people use Copilot, not just how many people have it. A usage-based setup gives finance plenty to watch, and Microsoft has given admins plenty of dials, as long as someone actually sets them.
For the latest on rollout status, Frontier enrollment and Copilot licensing, check our ongoing Microsoft 365 Copilot and enterprise administration threads, and compare notes with other admins as preview features reach real tenants.
