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Microsoft Makes Copilot Cowork Generally Available Worldwide
Microsoft on Tuesday announced the general availability of Copilot Cowork, moving one of its major agentic AI tools out of preview and into broader enterprise use.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot capability is designed to handle work that goes beyond chat-based assistance. Rather than only producing summaries, recommendations or first drafts, Cowork is meant to execute longer business tasks across files, apps, organizational data and connected tools.
Microsoft said Copilot Cowork is now generally available worldwide after three months in the company’s Frontier preview program. More than half of the Fortune 500 used Cowork during the preview, along with customers including Accenture, Avanade, Capital Group, Koch, Ooredoo Qatar and Zurich Insurance, according to Microsoft's announcement.
The company is positioning Cowork as a major step in its broader push to turn Copilot from a productivity assistant into an agentic work platform.
"Copilot Cowork executes complex, long-running, multi-tool tasks," Microsoft said in the announcement. "You define the work and Cowork runs it end-to-end and returns a completed result, not just a draft or a recommendation."
During the preview, Microsoft said customers used Cowork for spreadsheet editing, dependency flow chart generation, large-scale file comparison and pipeline analysis. In one example cited by the company, a team used Cowork to compare nearly 4,000 files across two product versions, work Microsoft said would otherwise have taken weeks.
Microsoft also said Cowork became "the fastest growing feature in the history of our Frontier program" and ranked among the company’s highest-satisfaction Copilot and agent experiences.
For IT leaders, however, the most important part of the announcement may be the administrative and cost controls surrounding the rollout. Copilot Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot user subscription license, but usage is billed separately through Copilot Credits. Microsoft said task pricing is based on model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime.
"Billing for Copilot Cowork begins today," Microsoft said. Tenants that used Cowork during the Frontier preview between March 30 and June 16 will not be billed until July 1, as part of a transition grace period.
Microsoft said administrators will be able to control when Cowork is enabled, who can access it and how much can be spent. Cowork is "off by default," the company said, with admins able to set spending limits at the tenant, group and user levels.
At launch, Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic models, including Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6. Microsoft said GPT 5.5 is available through Frontier, while a new Cowork 1 model is expected in the coming weeks.
The GA release also brings Cowork more deeply into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, along with new plugin support from partners including Enosix, Harvey, LSEG, Miro, monday.com, Moodys, Morningstar, S&P Global Energy and TeamsMaestro. Adobe, Atlassian, Box, Canva, Databricks and others are listed as coming soon.
Microsoft also emphasized security and compliance, saying Cowork prompts, responses and generated artifacts flow through existing Microsoft 365 controls. The GA release includes support for audit logs, Data Security Posture Management, eDiscovery, Insider Risk Management and sensitivity label inheritance, with Data Loss Prevention support coming later.
Separately, Microsoft announced the public preview of the Agent Identities Asset Connector for Microsoft Sentinel, a move aimed at giving security teams better visibility into the growing population of AI agents inside enterprise environments.
The connector is designed to ingest agent and agent blueprint identity data into Sentinel so security teams can understand ownership, analyze relationships and correlate agent identities with activity and risk signals. Microsoft describes the connector as a way to give defenders a central view of agent identities, which is likely to become more important as organizations move from experimenting with AI agents to deploying them across business processes.
For security operations teams, the preview addresses one of the emerging management problems around agentic AI: knowing which agents exist, who owns them, what they are connected to and how their activity relates to broader identity and security risk. That mirrors the same governance challenge enterprises have faced with human and workload identities, but with a new class of autonomous or semiautonomous systems layered on top.
The Sentinel connector also fits into Microsoft’s larger effort to make agent activity part of the security operations workflow rather than a separate administrative concern. By bringing agent identity assets into Sentinel, Microsoft is giving SOC teams another source of context for investigations, threat hunting and risk assessment as AI agents gain more access to enterprise data, apps and workflows.