After teasing its new Copilot “super app†last month, Microsoft is officially unveiling it today. The redesigned Copilot app bundles three AI capabilities into a single interface of chat, coding, and agents. As part of the launch, Microsoft is also rebranding Scout, the AI personal assistant it unveiled at Build earlier this year, as Autopilot.
This new Copilot app will have three tabs for Home, Code, and Autopilot, with Home combining Copilot Chat and Cowork together. It's the default landing experience for Copilot users, and Microsoft is also planning to include a Today feature inside it that works as a personalized dashboard for important emails, meeting requests, Teams threads, and more.
“Home is where you get your bearings, keeping you grounded and moving forward: review recent activity, get suggestions on what Copilot can help with, and pick up work right where you left off,†explains Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft.
The Code tab is the surprise addition to this so-called “super app,†and not one you'd typically associate with an app designed for knowledge workers. It will let anyone create an app, tracker, dashboard, or automation and share the results with colleagues as cloud-hosted internal apps. “Powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, Code runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely within your tenant,†says Spataro.
Autopilot is a new addition to the Copilot experience, and one that Spataro describes as a “digital teammate.†Previously called Scout and available initially as a desktop app, Autopilot is the cloud equivalent that enables a personal AI assistant to keep running while you're asleep. Like many other AI agents, Autopilot has its own cloud computer instance that can be tasked to do things like watch Teams channels, run recurring work tasks, or handle follow-ups.
The real difference against some other AI agents is that Microsoft has made Autopilot enterprise grade, appealing to businesses that rely on its Office and identity management suites. “Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, and it's built on Microsoft IQ so it understands how your organization actually works,†says Spataro. “It shows up where people already work — Teams, Outlook, chats, channels, and documents — so you can @mention it like a colleague, with permissions, audit, and governance behind it.â€
All of this focus on enterprise security and control is a big part of Microsoft trying to sell businesses on Copilot once again. The difference this time around is that how much a business pays for Copilot will depend on what their employees are doing. Microsoft is using usage-based billing for the Cowork, Code, and Autopilot parts of this new Copilot app, so any long-running agentic capabilities or usage of models like Astra and Fable will be billed based on usage.
The regular Copilot license, known as a user subscription license, will give you Copilot in Chat, and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Microsoft is using an auto model picker to match the model for each task, but IT admins will need to use Microsoft's new FinOps for AI to manage AI spend and ensure any agentic usage doesn't get out of control.
With this new Copilot app it feels like Microsoft has finally settled on a formula for its AI assistant. The company has redesigned Copilot plenty of times since its introduction as a chatbot inside Bing, and this latest three-tab design builds on the combination of its two separate consumer and commercial Copilot apps last month. That's a long-overdue change, alongside some big AI leadership shapeups that helped finally appoint a single Copilot boss for the first time.
The new Home and Code tabs will start rolling out to Microsoft's Frontier program for early access AI features “in the coming weeks,†and Autopilot will go into private preview later this month. Code will also be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
It's fair to say that Copilot has failed in the consumer space compared to Claude or ChatGPT, but Microsoft's core commercial customers are slowly showing interest. This new Copilot app isn't really designed to compete with things like Muse, and Microsoft is now calling it “the AI built for work.†Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also calls Copilot a new operating system. “We're building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task,†says Nadella in a post on X.
Microsoft is even comparing its new Copilot to how influential Office was on productivity. “Just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era,†says Spataro.
That might well be Microsoft's goal, but there's a lot more competition in this AI era than there ever was in the PC era. Microsoft has certainly fallen behind the likes of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Meta, and it'll be interesting to see if “the AI built for work†is enough to help it catch up.
Update, September 25th: Article updated with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's comments.
