Microsoft rebuilds Copilot around Home, Code, Autopilot

Microsoft introduced a rebuilt Copilot app with three new capabilities. Home merges Chat and Cowork into one entry point and brings Word, Excel and PowerPoint in as “Office in Copilot,” so drafts, budgets and decks come out as live, editable documents for the whole team rather than something rebuilt in another app. Code lets non-developers build small purpose-built solutions from a natural language description. Autopilot, previously called Scout, is a persistent agent that keeps working without a prompt. Microsoft also split pricing, moving agentic work onto metered billing.

What’s actually new

• Autopilot has its own identity, memory, computer and workspace inside the tenant. You give it a name, a role and a goal, and it watches channels, follows threads, runs recurring work and picks a project back up days later. It is cloud-hosted, so it keeps working while you sleep, and it surfaces in Teams, Outlook, chats and documents where you @mention it like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance behind it.
• Code runs sandboxed and can be hosted in your own tenant. It is built on the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot and produces desktop widgets, dashboards and cloud-hosted internal apps. New Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime provides the hosting so that code executes safely inside Microsoft 365, now in preview and opened to third-party and pro-code developers.
• Grounding widens. Microsoft IQ’s Fabric IQ brings the 20+ million semantic models in Power BI into Copilot and is generally available for Chat and Cowork, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform grounding enters public preview, and a unified plugin registry starts rolling out.
• Billing splits by workload type. A user subscription license with an “Auto” router that weighs accuracy, speed and cost per request covers everyday AI, while Cowork, Code, Autopilot and frontier models including Astra and Fable move to usage-based billing.

Why it matters

The billing change is the part worth watching. Microsoft is drawing a line between fixed-price interactive assistance and metered long-running agents, which is the first major vendor to price the two differently in the same product. Autopilot is a genuinely different cost shape from a chatbot, and flat per-seat pricing cannot absorb an agent that runs overnight.

Almost everything else here is still gated. Home and Code roll out through the Frontier program over the coming weeks, Autopilot reaches private preview at the end of the month, the “Today” command center enters private preview in October, and @Copilot in Teams follows by the end of the month. Microsoft points to Ignite, November 17 to 20, for the rest.

(Original source: Microsoft)