Watch how it works
See how Cowork takes a high-level ask and turns it into a finished workstream. Research, drafts, calendar updates, and follow-ups — all in minutes
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork
Copilot Cowork is an agentic system that plans, executes, and delivers work. It coordinates long-running, multi-step workflows across your apps, files, and data. Powered by Work IQ, it integrates signals from your work graph and applies task-appropriate models to produce context-aware results.
Read our announcementChoose your role
What Cowork can do for you
handshake Delegate end-to-end work
Describe the outcome, like “prep me for Thursday’s client review”. Cowork plans the steps, gathers inputs, and executes across your apps.
chat Communication
Draft and send emails, post updates in Teams channels and chats, create HTML newsletters, and prepare polished stakeholder communications — all from a single conversation.
document Documents & files
Create Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and PDFs from scratch. Edit existing files, browse your OneDrive and SharePoint, and reorganize content into new or existing folders.
calendar Calendar & meetings
Schedule meetings, resolve conflicts, protect focus time, and get pre-read briefings so you walk in with confidence.
search Research & search
Find documents, messages, and information across your organization. Run deep research that synthesizes multiple sources into comprehensive reports.
settings Automation
Schedule work on a recurring basis. Whether it’s daily briefings, weekly digests, or end-of-day wrap-ups, Cowork takes care of the follow-ups for you.
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Help rewrite
Can you help me rewrite this paragraph to make it clearer and more concise?
Explore a topic
I have a topic that I’m interested in and would like to learn more. Can you walk me through the basics and help me go deeper as we talk?
Summarize your email
You are my email analyst. Review all unread emails in my outlook inbox and summarize each on in a structured table.
Follow up on emails
Please summarize the emails I’ve received over the past two weeks and priortize them based on urgency.
Where to find Cowork
What Cowork can do
Cowork can draft documents, coordinate meetings, manage your inbox and calendar, post in Teams, research a topic, and more. You can also schedule prompts to run automatically. Cowork breaks complex requests into steps and shows its progress, so you can steer at any point. It automatically picks the model best suited to each task, for example one model for building slides and another for deep writing and research, so you get strong results without having to choose. Because Cowork runs inside your Microsoft 365 environment, the work it produces is grounded in your context.
You direct what Cowork does and how far it goes at every step, so you are always in control.
- Approve sensitive actions: Cowork asks before it takes action, like sending an email or posting in Teams. It includes a risk level indicator so you can gauge the impact. Cancel any action with one click.
- Pause, resume, or cancel: Pause anytime, pick back up when you are ready, or stop a task entirely.
- Manage your tasks in one place: See all your conversations and scheduled prompts in the Tasks view, and filter by status.
Choose the right tool: Chat, Cowork, or agents
The simplest rule of thumb: Use Chat when you want an answer, Cowork when you want something done.
Chat, Cowork, and agents, such as the ones built in Agent Builder, each serve a different purpose. Use the table below as a quick reference for those conversations.
| Chat | Cowork | Agents | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Conversational AI for drafting, Q&A, and ideation | Delegate and execute long-running, multi-step work across your apps | Ready-made agents for specialized or repeatable tasks |
| How you interact | A conversation: You steer each step from prompt → response | An assignment: You describe the goal, check in at key milestones | A workflow: You pick an agent built for a specific job |
| Typical work pattern | You’re in the loop: One prompt, one result, then you choose what’s next | You step away: Cowork plans, manages files and tasks across apps, and delivers completed work | You run it on demand: The agent handles the same scoped task each time |
Explore scenarios to spark ideas
These scenarios are starting points, not prescribed workflows. They give concrete examples of what a Cowork task can look like. They show not only how Cowork can work autonomously but also leverage Work IQ for contextual results.
Cowork reviews the week and proposes calendar changes for you to approve.
- Flags conflicts, double-bookings, and meetings you are only optionally required for.
- Proposes declines, reschedules, and focus blocks.
- Acts on each item once you approve.
This is a common problem everyone has, which makes it a strong first scenario for the team. The inputs sit entirely in your own calendar, and the approval checkpoint makes it low risk.
Example prompt:
“Review my calendar for next week. Flag any conflicts, double-bookings, or meetings I’m only optionally required for. Propose declines or reschedules for anything that looks low-value and suggest where I could block focus time. Walk me through each change one at a time and only act after I approve.”
Cowork helps sellers review the pipeline, surfacing what needs attention and taking action deal by deal.
- Pulls a summary of open opportunities from Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Flags at-risk deals based on stalled activity, slipped close dates, or softening commits.
- Recommends an action for each at-risk deal based on deal health.
- Builds a one-page review deck for top commits ahead of reviews.
This is recurring, multi-app work with direct customer impact, which is why the approval checkpoint matters most in this scenario.
Cowork builds the onboarding package piece by piece, sequencing day-one blockers first.
- Pulls the new hire’s role and start date from HR data.
- Checks pending access and equipment.
- Reviews the first two weeks of calendar.
- Works through the gaps: welcome email, introductory 1:1s, 30/60/90-day plan, reading folder, Teams channel introduction post.
This is high coordination work that managers usually spread across weeks, compressed into a single working session.
Effective prompting with Cowork
Most Cowork outcomes depend on how clearly you scope your request. A prompt like “clean up my calendar” leaves too much open to interpretation, so Cowork has to guess what you want, which shapes the results you get. Be specific about what success looks like when you ask. Start with this guide:
- Outcome: One sentence describing what done looks like.
- Inputs: The specific people, files, sites, or time ranges the task should use.
- Definition of done: The concrete deliverable, e.g., an email sent, a document saved in OneDrive, a meeting on the calendar.
- Constraints: Things to avoid or honor, e.g., do not contact customers, keep it under one page, use the FY27 template.
- Approval scope: Which actions the user wants to review explicitly, beyond the default checkpoints.
Example, before:
“Help me prep for my offsite next week.”
Example, after:
“Outcome: A briefing pack and a draft agenda for the offsite on June 12. Inputs: The offsite invite, the three pre-reads I attached to it, and emails from the offsite distribution list in the last two weeks. Definition of done: A one-page Word doc saved to my OneDrive Offsite folder, and a draft agenda emailed to my direct reports for feedback. Constraints: No external attendees. Approval scope: Default — review the email before sending.”
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and is available in Copilot tenants. IT administrators control who can access it and can deploy and pin it using standard Copilot governance tools.
Getting started with Cowork: what you’ll see
If Cowork is turned on for you, select the Cowork toggle in Microsoft 365 Copilot to jump in. Don’t see the toggle at all? Contact your IT admin to get access.
arrow_maximize
1. Finding Cowork: the toggle
The Cowork toggle sits at the top of your left navigation in Microsoft 365 Copilot, next to Home. Select Cowork to switch into the experience.
Learn morearrow_maximize
2. When Cowork is ready for you
Selecting it opens your personalized homepage with suggested tasks tailored to your recent work.
Learn morearrow_maximize
3. When you need to request access
If you can see the Cowork toggle, but it isn't switched on for you yet, selecting it opens a brief overview of what Cowork does with a one-click Request access button. Once your request is approved, you're ready to go.
Learn morearrow_maximize
4. When you reach a usage limit
When you reach your usage limit, you can request more credits by clicking on ``Request more``. Once your admin approves, you're notified both in the product and by email.
Learn moreStay connected in our communities
Microsoft Developer Community
Where developers connect, learn, and build solutions on Microsoft platforms.
Get connectedGo further
AI Skills Navigator
Find interest-based skilling playlists.
Advanced resources
Advanced resources for IT Pros and admins, Champions and Adoption Managers, and Leadership.
Learning hub
Explore our collection of skilling courses for Copilot and agents for IT Pros and Developers.
Get access to Cowork
Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you and your team already have Copilot, check with your IT admin or adoption and change management lead to find out when Cowork will be available. Once enabled, Cowork will appear inside Microsoft 365 Copilot (web or the app) in the same place you already find Chat.
Keep in mind that Cowork requires more capacity than Chat, because each task runs through many steps. If your team hits usage limits or other constraints, loop in the same contact for guidance.
Launch Cowork to your team
An AI Champion can turn Cowork from interest into habit. Identify good starter scenarios, run working sessions, troubleshoot issues, and share examples that help the team find value and accelerate productivity.
Build your strategy
Objective: Find where Cowork will save your team the most time, so it earns trust on day one.
- Listen for where the team loses hours to multi-step work, such as calendar churn, meeting prep, research, and plan drafting. Standups and 1:1s are the best place to catch this.
- Set the team’s rule of thumb on Cowork vs. Chat: Chat for answers and quick drafts, Cowork for end-to-end work that spans apps and time.
- Pick two or three scenarios to lead with at launch. Calendar cleanup is a strong first choice because everyone faces the same challenge and can see the value immediately.
Roll out Cowork
Objective: Get the team into Cowork with the context to use it confidently.
- Send the launch announcement. Use this email template to introduce Cowork and set expectations. Link to the starter scenarios and your learning community for user engagement.
- Run a live demo. Walk through one full workflow end-to-end, either the Cowork demo or a scenario from the team’s work.
- Host a working session to get teammates comfortable with Cowork, coach on effective prompting, answer questions in your community, and offer live troubleshooting. Aim for one approved Cowork action per teammate before they leave.
Generate excitement
Objective: Move from awareness to active use by celebrating completed work.
- Run a two-week Cowork challenge. Ask each teammate to delegate one recurring task and score on time saved and outcomes shipped.
- Spotlight real outputs in standup or a team channel: a brief, a deck, or a research memo a teammate actually used.
- Continue to coach on effective prompting. A good Cowork task names the goal, the inputs, and what “done” looks like. Share two or three prompts the team can reuse.
Share success and gather feedback
Objective: Turn early use into a story to share with leaders and the team.
- Track the signals that matter, such as task completion, hours saved on recurring work, and scheduled runs.
- Collect two or three concrete success stories. Get specific about what worked well: the task delegated, the time saved, and what changed in how the teammate worked. For stand-out stories, use the template to share with your network on Viva Engage and LinkedIn.
- Send a short feedback survey. Ask what’s working, what’s confusing, and what teammates want Cowork to do next. Download our survey template.
Join the Community
Objective: Sustain momentum by plugging into our communities.
- Join the Microsoft 365 Champion community to build your skills and get access to Microsoft experts. Become a Champion today.
- Join the Copilot Community on the Microsoft Tech Community to learn about product updates, ask questions, and find answers. Subscribe to updates.
- Bring one learning back to the team each month. The point of being connected is to keep your team’s playbook fresh.
Coach the team on effective prompting
Most Cowork outcomes come down to scoping. A request like “clean up my calendar” doesn’t tell Cowork what “clean” means, which shapes everything Cowork does next. Coaching the team on scoping is one of the most critical things a Champion can do. Start with this guide:
- Outcome: One sentence describing what done looks like.
- Inputs: The specific people, files, sites, or time ranges the task should use.
- Definition of done: The concrete deliverable, e.g., an email sent, a document saved in OneDrive, a meeting on the calendar.
- Constraints: Things to avoid or honor, e.g., do not contact customers, keep it under one page, use the FY27 template.
- Approval scope: Which actions the user wants to review explicitly, beyond the default checkpoints.
Example, before:
“Help me prep for my offsite next week.”
Example, after:
“Outcome: A briefing pack and a draft agenda for the offsite on June 12. Inputs: The offsite invite, the three pre-reads I attached to it, and emails from the offsite distribution list in the last two weeks. Definition of done: A one-page Word doc saved to my OneDrive Offsite folder, and a draft agenda emailed to my direct reports for feedback. Constraints: No external attendees. Approval scope: Default — review the email before sending.”
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
Stay connected in our communities
Microsoft Developer Community
Where developers connect, learn, and build solutions on Microsoft platforms.
Get connectedGo further
AI Skills Navigator
Find interest-based skilling playlists.
Advanced resources
Advanced resources for IT Pros and admins, Champions and Adoption Managers, and Leadership.
Learning hub
Explore our collection of skilling courses for Copilot and agents for IT Pros and Developers.
How Cowork is different from Copilot
- Delegation, not prompting: Copilot chat responds to one prompt at a time. Cowork shifts from prompt to whole projects. You define the outcome. Cowork returns completed work.
- Task continuity: Cowork holds context across steps and sessions, so it can work on tasks that run for minutes to hours. That means multi-step business processes like pipeline reviews, onboarding, and account research can be handled end-to-end, not just the single prompt pieces of them.
- Grounded in your real work, not generic outputs: Work IQ, the intelligence layer that personalizes Copilot to you and your organization, grounds every job in the systems your business already runs on, so the work reflects real context.
What you need to know about Cowork
- Partner plugins: Cowork works with the tools your teams already use, including monday.com, Miro, and Harvey, so they can hand off work that spans beyond Microsoft 365.
- Security and governance: Nothing new to stand up. Cowork runs on the Microsoft 365 controls you already have, inheriting your permissions, sensitivity labels, and audit settings. Because it acts on your behalf, it previews every action, flags it by risk level, and lets you pause or stop at any point.
- Pricing: A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is a prerequisite for Cowork. Cowork usage is paid for with Copilot Credits, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go or prepaid currency for AI usage-based billing, with usage visible in admin dashboards. Learn more about Copilot Credits.
- Multiple models, matched to your work: Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5. Cowork matches each task to the best-suited model: Anthropic for visual-heavy work like PowerPoint and graphics and OpenAI for deeper writing and formatted documents, so you get the strongest output where it matters most. Users can choose a specific model family in the model picker, or admins can set one for the whole organization.
Where you set direction
star
Which teams get Cowork first
Work with your AI Council members and stakeholders to prioritize access for roles where AI delivers the highest ROI. Start there, measure the impact, and expand access as results come in.
shield
IT and security alignment
Cowork uses existing Microsoft 365 controls, but your IT and security teams own the levers. Align on these before enabling Cowork.
lightbulb
The bar for autonomy
Cowork is the most autonomous Copilot experience to date. Discuss with your AI Council which categories of work it’s appropriate for, what guardrails apply, and how you measure whether it’s working.
money
Budget and enablement
Cowork usage runs on Copilot Credits. This is a budgeting and technical decision. Partner with your leads to set your budget and switch on for the right users. Use this Customer Cowork Estimator to help size your budget.
Your role as an AI Leader
- Demonstrate: Use Cowork yourself. Pick a scenario, run it end-to-end, and share what you handed off.
- Lead: Pick one to three priority scenarios for your organization, then brief your AI Council on why those and what success looks like. Strong starting points are customer prep, pipeline and sales, and inbox and calendar triage.
- Reinforce: Send the launch announcement to your organization, including the chosen priority scenarios. Then make it a regular habit in your team meetings: ask what people handed off to Cowork, and call out specific examples by name.
- Measure: Pick a few simple signals to track, like how many people use Cowork and what they hand off to it. Set your baseline now, then check it regularly to watch usage grow. Tie these back to the success measures your AI Council set.
Quick watch
Understand billing
Learn how Copilot Cowork pricing works, how to estimate your spend, and the controls we’re giving you to manage it.
Watch how it works
Cowork moves you work from to-do to done.
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
Stay connected in our communities
Microsoft Developer Community
Where developers connect, learn, and build solutions on Microsoft platforms.
Get connectedGo further
AI Skills Navigator
Find interest-based skilling playlists.
Advanced resources
Advanced resources for IT Pros and admins, Champions and Adoption Managers, and Leadership.
Learning hub
Explore our collection of skilling courses for Copilot and agents for IT Pros and Developers.
Built on the Microsoft trust foundation
The same commitments and controls that protect your data in Microsoft 365 apply to Copilot Cowork:
- We secure your data at rest and in transit through encryption, physical security controls, and tenant isolation.
- You control your data. Our approach to data privacy keeps you in control of the data you put in the cloud.
- Your data is not used to train foundation models.
- You’re protected against AI security and copyright risks.
Security and governance
Cowork acts as the user, inside the same permission, label, and policy surface they already work in. Sensitive actions like send, post, share, schedule, or change, all wait at a checkpoint for user approval before they run. Cowork also runs inside your existing Microsoft 365 security and compliance posture. There’s no new stack to learn and no separate policy surface to manage.
- Permissions: Cowork can only see what the user can see. SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, mailbox, and people graph access all follow existing entitlements.
- Policy enforcement: Sensitive actions — send, share, post, schedule — pause for user confirmation before they run and follow the same tenant policies as any other user action.
- Purview coverage: Cowork prompts, responses, and generated artifacts are governed, auditable, and discoverable through the same Purview controls your team uses for the rest of Copilot.
Model choice
Different tasks need different strengths; deep reasoning, fast synthesis, or structured analysis. Cowork applies the right model to each step of a task, without breaking context. The result is higher-quality output delivered in the flow of work, with enterprise controls firmly in place.
If you plan to use Anthropic models with Cowork, confirm they are enabled in your tenant. Learn more: Manage Anthropic models.
Get access and set up Cowork
Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and becomes available once you set up credit-based billing. You decide who gets access: enable for everyone or for specific groups. You can also turn on the discovery setting so Cowork is ready for users when they open Copilot. Learn more about the discovery toggle.
Before you begin:
- Confirm Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are assigned to your target users.
- Confirm whether your tenant already has credit-based billing enabled (for example, from existing agent usage).
- If you plan to use Anthropic models, verify they are enabled in your tenant.
- Align with your AI Leader and finance partner on rollout scope and use the cost estimator to budget before enabling broadly.
Deploy Cowork to the organization
Use our Microsoft 365 implementation framework to deploy Cowork to your users. Expand the phases below to find curated resources for each step of the framework.
How Cowork is billed
Cowork uses Copilot Credits, a single, pooled billing currency that meters AI usage across Copilot services and agents. Credits are shared at the tenant level, with policy controls to assign limits by group or user. Credit usage per task depends on the mix of tokens used, models used, data and tools invoked, and safety/policy checks performed.
Choose your billing model
You fund Credits two ways, and most organizations use both together.
| Prepaid Copilot Credits | Pay-as-you-go Copilot Credits | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Predictable, committed usage | Flexibility to scale up or down |
| Term | Annual | No commitment |
| Cost | Lowest per-credit cost | $0.01 USD per credit |
How to think about the two:
- Prepaid first. An annual commitment gives the lowest per-credit cost. This is ideal once you’re confident in a baseline. If you already run Copilot Studio agents, this is likely where you’ll land, since you can pool credits across services.
- Pay-as-you-go as the safety net. At one cent per credit with no commitment, PAYG is the natural starting point if you don’t have usage history yet or want to pilot before committing volume.
Set up Copilot Credits
All credit-based billing is configured in the Microsoft 365 admin center: Copilot → Cost Management → Configuration. At a high level, here’s what you’ll do:
- Create a billing policy and name it.
- Scope it to all users, specific security groups, or individual users. Security groups are recommended for department-level control.
- Set limits and alerts: choose an unlimited or limited monthly budget, define custom spend thresholds with estimated cost visibility, configure alert emails to admins and stakeholders, and apply optional per-user caps to protect the shared pool.
- Select the agents and services the policy covers.
- Set the billing method — prepaid credits or pay-as-you-go via an Azure subscription.
- Review and activate. A consolidated screen summarizes scope, services, billing method, limits, and alerts before you go live.
Three key cost management scenarios
Three situations come up most often. Each maps to a control you have in Cost Management within the admin center.
- One user is using the team’s credit pool: Apply a per-user hard cap within the group policy so no single user can drain the shared pool. Review usage by group to spot heavy users early, before they hit a limit.
- A department exceeds its monthly allocation: Use a group-scoped policy with a hard limit targeted to a security group, and watch group usage so you can act before an overrun.
- An agent is using premium services for routine tasks: Bind specific agents to a spend limit through policy, surface the cost-driving agent in the agents-and-services view, and apply per-agent caps.
Plan your budget with cost modeling
Before you set spending limits, model expected costs with your early adopters so your budgets reflect real usage rather than arbitrary caps. Follow the recommended steps below or use the Customer Cowork Estimator to help size your budget.
- Identify a representative group of Champions for the roles you want to model.
- Ask them to collect their key Cowork activities, how many times per week each is used, and the average Credit cost per activity.
- Calculate weekly cost per role: cost per activity × frequency, summed across activities.
- Use those numbers to set realistic group and user budgets in Cost Management — with confidence.
Prepare your tenant
Objective: Ensure your security and identity posture is ready for Cowork to take action.
- Confirm Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are assigned to the pilot group.
- Review SharePoint and OneDrive sharing in your pilot group’s sites. Tighten any broad “Everyone except external users” links on sensitive content.
- Verify that sensitivity labels, DLP, and retention policies cover the content the pilot group will work with.
- Brief your security and compliance partners on the Cowork audit trail and what to expect in Purview.
Select your users
Objective: Identify which users to enable Cowork for.
Determine the group of business users that will get the most value from this capability. Work with stakeholders and adoption staff to designate these people.
Enable and deploy
Objective: Make Cowork available to your pilot group with the controls you want from day one.
- Enable Anthropic models in MAC if you plan to use them.
- Set Cowork availability to specific users or groups and add your pilot security group.
- Deploy Cowork to the pilot group so it appears in their Copilot rail without manual install.
- Pin Cowork in the rail, so the pilot group sees it the first time they open Copilot.
Set budgets and policies
Objective: Turn on Copilot Credits with spend controls.
- Turn on credit-based billing for Copilot services and agents.
- Choose prepaid Credits, pay-as-you-go, or both — match the model your finance team uses elsewhere.
- Create a billing policy scoped to your pilot security group. For example, set a monthly budget and an alert at the 70% threshold.
- Apply user-level caps to protect shared capacity during the learning curve.
- Optional: add your IT, finance, and AI Leader stakeholders to the alert distribution list.
Communicate and scale
Objective: Turn the early adopters’ usage into a story you can share, then expand access with confidence.
- Share early outcomes with leadership: task volume, time saved, examples of completed work.
- Refine budgets based on observed patterns. Lift user-level caps where they create friction without protecting spend.
- Expand Cowork access to the next security group, then repeat the budget-and-monitor cycle.
- Send periodic feedback pulses so you hear when something is slowing users down.
Collect feedback
Objective: Watch the patterns, catch problems early, and build a repeatable governance rhythm.
- Add the Cost Management dashboard in MAC to your weekly IT operations review.
- Identify users approaching their cap so you can coach them before they hit it.
- Pull a monthly snapshot of usage by user and by group for your AI leader and CFO.
- Audit a sample of Cowork actions in Purview so the security team can verify policies are landing as expected.
- Define an escalation path for users who hit their limit mid-task and need more capacity.
What you can monitor today
Cost Management in the admin center gives you credit-usage visibility from day one:
- Overall usage — total Credit usage over time against your budget.
- Usage by user — per-user usage against limits, to spot heavy users early.
- Usage by group — group-level usage against group budgets.
- Usage by agent and service — which agents/services use credits.
Pair this with the Microsoft Purview audit log, where Cowork actions are recorded alongside the rest of your estate.
Perform service health reviews
Service health reviews (SHR) are where the implementation team and business stakeholders come together to review the insights from their AI transformation projects. Gather your AI Council members and stakeholders to understand usage patterns, challenges, and success stories. Use the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Copilot Dashboard data for these check-ins along. Use insights to alter continued deployment and adoption plans.
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
Stay connected in our communities
Microsoft Developer Community
Where developers connect, learn, and build solutions on Microsoft platforms.
Get connectedGo further
AI Skills Navigator
Find interest-based skilling playlists.
Advanced resources
Advanced resources for IT Pros and admins, Champions and Adoption Managers, and Leadership.
Learning hub
Explore our collection of skilling courses for Copilot and agents for IT Pros and Developers.
Watch how it works
See how Cowork takes a high-level ask and turns it into a finished workstream. Research, drafts, calendar updates, and follow-ups — all in minutes
What Cowork can do for you
handshake Delegate end-to-end work
Describe the outcome, like “prep me for Thursday’s client review”. Cowork plans the steps, gathers inputs, and executes across your apps.
chat Communication
Draft and send emails, post updates in Teams channels and chats, create HTML newsletters, and prepare polished stakeholder communications — all from a single conversation.
document Documents & files
Create Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and PDFs from scratch. Edit existing files, browse your OneDrive and SharePoint, and reorganize content into new or existing folders.
calendar Calendar & meetings
Schedule meetings, resolve conflicts, protect focus time, and get pre-read briefings so you walk in with confidence.
search Research & search
Find documents, messages, and information across your organization. Run deep research that synthesizes multiple sources into comprehensive reports.
settings Automation
Schedule work on a recurring basis. Whether it’s daily briefings, weekly digests, or end-of-day wrap-ups, Cowork takes care of the follow-ups for you.
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Help rewrite
Can you help me rewrite this paragraph to make it clearer and more concise?
Explore a topic
I have a topic that I’m interested in and would like to learn more. Can you walk me through the basics and help me go deeper as we talk?
Summarize your email
You are my email analyst. Review all unread emails in my outlook inbox and summarize each on in a structured table.
Follow up on emails
Please summarize the emails I’ve received over the past two weeks and priortize them based on urgency.
Where to find Cowork
Built on the Microsoft trust foundation
The same commitments and controls that protect your data in Microsoft 365 apply to Copilot Cowork:
- We secure your data at rest and in transit through encryption, physical security controls, and tenant isolation.
- You control your data. Our approach to data privacy keeps you in control of the data you put in the cloud.
- Your data is not used to train foundation models.
- You’re protected against AI security and copyright risks.
Security and governance
Cowork acts as the user, inside the same permission, label, and policy surface they already work in. Sensitive actions like send, post, share, schedule, or change, all wait at a checkpoint for user approval before they run. Cowork also runs inside your existing Microsoft 365 security and compliance posture. There’s no new stack to learn and no separate policy surface to manage.
- Permissions: Cowork can only see what the user can see. SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, mailbox, and people graph access all follow existing entitlements.
- Policy enforcement: Sensitive actions — send, share, post, schedule — pause for user confirmation before they run and follow the same tenant policies as any other user action.
- Purview coverage: Cowork prompts, responses, and generated artifacts are governed, auditable, and discoverable through the same Purview controls your team uses for the rest of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Learn more: Use Microsoft Purview to manage data security & compliance.
Model choice
Different tasks need different strengths; deep reasoning, fast synthesis, or structured analysis. Cowork applies the right model to each step of a task, without breaking context. The result is higher-quality output delivered in the flow of work, with enterprise controls firmly in place.
If you plan to use Anthropic models with Cowork, confirm they are enabled in your tenant. Learn more: Manage Anthropic models.
Get access and set up Cowork
Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. By default, Cowork is available to all licensed users in your tenant. Users can discover it themselves in the Agent Store. As the admin, you decide whether to keep that default, scope access to specific security groups, or deploy and pin Cowork so it’s already there when users open Copilot.
Before you begin:
- Confirm Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are assigned to your target users.
- Confirm whether your tenant already has credit-based billing enabled (for example, from existing agent usage).
- If you plan to use Anthropic models, verify they are enabled in your tenant.
- Align with your AI Leader and finance partner on rollout scope and budget before enabling broadly.
Where to do each step
- Allow access — Enable usage-based billing and activate a spending policy in Copilot → Cost Management. This turns Cowork on for your organization.
- Make Cowork discoverable — Turn on the discovery setting in Copilot → Settings so users can find Cowork.
- Scope and budget — Use spending policies to target all users or specific groups (including security groups for geographic or organizational segments) and set per-user or per-group limits.
For complete step-by-step guidance — including admin roles, plugins, models, and browser controls — see Manage Copilot Cowork for your organization.
Deploy Cowork to the organization
Use our Microsoft 365 implementation framework to deploy Cowork to your users. Expand the phases below to find curated resources for each step of the framework.
How Cowork is billed
Cowork uses Copilot Credits, a single, pooled billing currency that meters AI usage across Copilot services and agents. Credits are shared at the tenant level, with policy controls to assign limits by group or user. Credit usage per task depends on the mix of tokens used, models used, data and tools invoked, and safety/policy checks performed.
Choose your billing model
You fund Credits two ways, and most organizations use both together.
| Prepaid Copilot Credits | Pay-as-you-go Copilot Credits | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Predictable, committed usage | Flexibility to scale up or down |
| Term | Annual | No commitment |
| Cost | Lowest per-credit cost | $0.01 USD per credit |
How to think about the two:
- Prepaid first. An annual commitment gives the lowest per-credit cost. This is ideal once you’re confident in a baseline. If you already run Copilot Studio agents, this is likely where you’ll land, since you can pool credits across services.
- Pay-as-you-go as the safety net. At one cent per credit with no commitment, PAYG is the natural starting point if you don’t have usage history yet or want to pilot before committing volume.
Set up Copilot Credits
All credit-based billing is configured in the Microsoft 365 admin center: Copilot → Cost Management → Configuration. At a high level, here’s what you’ll do:
- Create a billing policy and name it.
- Scope it to all users, specific security groups, or individual users. Security groups are recommended for department-level control.
- Set limits and alerts: choose an unlimited or limited monthly budget, define custom spend thresholds with estimated cost visibility, configure alert emails to admins and stakeholders, and apply optional per-user caps to protect the shared pool.
- Select the agents and services the policy covers.
- Set the billing method — prepaid credits or pay-as-you-go via an Azure subscription.
- Review and activate. A consolidated screen summarizes scope, services, billing method, limits, and alerts before you go live.
Three key cost management scenarios
Three situations come up most often. Each maps to a control you have in Cost Management within the admin center.
- One user is using the team’s credit pool: Apply a per-user hard cap within the group policy so no single user can drain the shared pool. Review usage by group to spot heavy users early, before they hit a limit.
- A department exceeds its monthly allocation: Use a group-scoped policy with a hard limit targeted to a security group, and watch group usage so you can act before an overrun.
- An agent is using premium services for routine tasks: Bind specific agents to a spend limit through policy, surface the cost-driving agent in the agents-and-services view, and apply per-agent caps.
Plan your budget with cost modeling
Before you set spending limits, model expected costs with your early adopters so your budgets reflect real usage rather than arbitrary caps. Follow the recommended steps below or use the Customer Cowork Estimator to help size your budget.
- Identify a representative group of Champions for the roles you want to model.
- Ask them to collect their key Cowork activities, how many times per week each is used, and the average Credit cost per activity.
- Calculate weekly cost per role: cost per activity × frequency, summed across activities.
- Use those numbers to set realistic group and user budgets in Cost Management — with confidence.
Prepare your tenant
Objective: ensure your security and identity posture is ready for Cowork to take action.
- Confirm Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are assigned to the pilot group.
- Review SharePoint and OneDrive sharing in your pilot group’s sites. Tighten any broad “Everyone except external users” links on sensitive content.
- Verify that sensitivity labels, DLP, and retention policies cover the content the pilot group will work with.
- Brief your security and compliance partners on the Cowork audit trail and what to expect in Purview.
Enable and deploy
Objective: make Cowork available to your pilot group with the controls you want from day one.
- Enable Anthropic models in MAC if you plan to use them.
- Set Cowork availability to specific users or groups and add your pilot security group.
- Deploy Cowork to the pilot group so it appears in their Copilot rail without manual install.
- Pin Cowork in the rail, so the pilot group sees it the first time they open Copilot.
Set budgets and policies
Objective: turn on Copilot Credits with spend controls.
- Turn on credit-based billing for Copilot services and agents.
- Choose prepaid Credits, pay-as-you-go, or both — match the model your finance team uses elsewhere.
- Create a billing policy scoped to your pilot security group. For example, set a monthly budget and an alert at the 70% threshold.
- Apply user-level caps to protect shared capacity during the learning curve.
- Optional: add your IT, finance, and AI Leader stakeholders to the alert distribution list.
Monitor and govern
Objective: watch the patterns, catch problems early, and build a repeatable governance rhythm.
- Add the Cost Management dashboard in MAC to your weekly IT operations review.
- Identify users approaching their cap so you can coach them before they hit it.
- Pull a monthly snapshot of usage by user and by group for your AI leader and CFO.
- Audit a sample of Cowork actions in Purview so the security team can verify policies are landing as expected.
- Define an escalation path for users who hit their limit mid-task and need more capacity.
Communicate and scale
Objective: turn the early adopters’ usage into a story you can share, then expand access with confidence.
- Share early outcomes with leadership: task volume, time saved, examples of completed work.
- Refine budgets based on observed patterns. Lift user-level caps where they create friction without protecting spend.
- Expand Cowork access to the next security group, then repeat the budget-and-monitor cycle.
- Send periodic feedback pulses so you hear when something is slowing users down.
What you can monitor today
Cost Management in the admin center gives you credit-usage visibility from day one:
- Overall usage — total Credit usage over time against your budget.
- Usage by user — per-user usage against limits, to spot heavy users early.
- Usage by group — group-level usage against group budgets.
- Usage by agent and service — which agents/services use credits.
Pair this with the Microsoft Purview audit log, where Cowork actions are recorded alongside the rest of your estate.
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
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Get access to Cowork
Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you and your team already have Copilot, check with your IT admin or adoption and change management lead to find out when Cowork will be available. Once enabled, Cowork will appear inside Microsoft 365 Copilot (web or the app) in the same place you already find Chat.
Keep in mind that Cowork requires more capacity than Chat, because each task runs through many steps. If your team hits usage limits or other constraints, loop in the same contact for guidance.
Launch Cowork to your team
An AI Champion can turn Cowork from interest into habit. Identify good starter scenarios, run working sessions, troubleshoot issues, and share examples that help the team find value and accelerate productivity.
Build your strategy
Objective: Find where Cowork will save your team the most time, so it earns trust on day one.
- Listen for where the team loses hours to multi-step work, such as calendar churn, meeting prep, research, and plan drafting. Standups and 1:1s are the best place to catch this.
- Set the team’s rule of thumb on Cowork vs. Chat: Chat for answers and quick drafts, Cowork for end-to-end work that spans apps and time.
- Pick two or three scenarios to lead with at launch. Calendar cleanup is a strong first choice because everyone faces the same challenge and can see the value immediately.
Roll out Cowork
Objective: Get the team into Cowork with the context to use it confidently.
- Send the launch announcement. Use this email template to introduce Cowork and set expectations. Link to the starter scenarios and your learning community for user engagement.
- Run a live demo. Walk through one full workflow end-to-end, either the Cowork demo or a scenario from the team’s work.
- Host a working session to get teammates comfortable with Cowork, coach on effective prompting, answer questions in your community, and offer live troubleshooting. Aim for one approved Cowork action per teammate before they leave.
Generate excitement
Objective: Move from awareness to active use by celebrating completed work.
- Run a two-week Cowork challenge. Ask each teammate to delegate one recurring task and score on time saved and outcomes shipped.
- Spotlight real outputs in standup or a team channel: a brief, a deck, or a research memo a teammate actually used.
- Continue to coach on effective prompting. A good Cowork task names the goal, the inputs, and what “done” looks like. Share two or three prompts the team can reuse.
Share success and gather feedback
Objective: Turn early use into a story to share with leaders and the team.
- Track the signals that matter, such as task completion, hours saved on recurring work, and scheduled runs.
- Collect two or three concrete success stories. Get specific about what worked well: the task delegated, the time saved, and what changed in how the teammate worked. For stand-out stories, use the template to share with your network on Viva Engage and LinkedIn.
- Send a short feedback survey. Ask what’s working, what’s confusing, and what teammates want Cowork to do next. Download our survey template.
Join the Community
Objective: Sustain momentum by plugging into our communities.
- Join the Microsoft 365 Champion community to build your skills and get access to Microsoft experts. Become a Champion today.
- Join the Copilot Community on the Microsoft Tech Community to learn about product updates, ask questions, and find answers. Subscribe to updates.
- Bring one learning back to the team each month. The point of being connected is to keep your team’s playbook fresh.
Coach the team on effective prompting
Most Cowork outcomes come down to scoping. A request like “clean up my calendar” doesn’t tell Cowork what “clean” means, which shapes everything Cowork does next. Coaching the team on scoping is one of the most critical things a Champion can do. Start with this guide:
- Outcome: One sentence describing what done looks like.
- Inputs: The specific people, files, sites, or time ranges the task should use.
- Definition of done: The concrete deliverable, e.g., an email sent, a document saved in OneDrive, a meeting on the calendar.
- Constraints: Things to avoid or honor, e.g., do not contact customers, keep it under one page, use the FY27 template.
- Approval scope: Which actions the user wants to review explicitly, beyond the default checkpoints.
Example, before:
“Help me prep for my offsite next week.”
Example, after:
“Outcome: A briefing pack and a draft agenda for the offsite on June 12. Inputs: The offsite invite, the three pre-reads I attached to it, and emails from the offsite distribution list in the last two weeks. Definition of done: A one-page Word doc saved to my OneDrive Offsite folder, and a draft agenda emailed to my direct reports for feedback. Constraints: No external attendees. Approval scope: Default — review the email before sending.”
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
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What Cowork can do
Cowork can draft documents, coordinate meetings, manage your inbox and calendar, post in Teams, research a topic, and more. You can also schedule prompts to run automatically. Cowork breaks complex requests into steps and shows its progress, so you can steer at any point. It automatically picks the model best suited to each task, for example one model for building slides and another for deep writing and research, so you get strong results without having to choose. Because Cowork runs inside your Microsoft 365 environment, the work it produces is grounded in your context.
You direct what Cowork does and how far it goes at every step, so you are always in control.
- Approve sensitive actions: Cowork asks before it takes action, like sending an email or posting in Teams. It includes a risk level indicator so you can gauge the impact. Cancel any action with one click.
- Pause, resume, or cancel: Pause anytime, pick back up when you are ready, or stop a task entirely.
- Manage your tasks in one place: See all your conversations and scheduled prompts in the Tasks view, and filter by status.
Choose the right tool: Chat, Cowork, or agents
The simplest rule of thumb: use Chat when you want an answer. Use Cowork when you want something done.
Chat, Cowork, and agents, e.g., in Agent Builder, each serves a different purpose. Use the table below as a quick reference for those conversations.
| Chat | Cowork | Agents | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Conversational AI for drafting, Q&A, and ideation | Delegate and execute long-running, multistep work across your apps | Ready-made agents for specialized or repeatable tasks |
| How you interact | A conversation: you steer each step from prompt → response | An assignment: you describe the goal, check in at key milestones | A workflow: you pick an agent built for a specific job |
| Typical work pattern | You’re in the loop: one prompt, one result, then you choose what’s next | You step away: Cowork plans, manages files and tasks across apps, and delivers completed work | You run it on demand: the agent handles the same scoped task each time |
Explore scenarios to spark ideas
These scenarios are starting points, not prescribed workflows. They give concrete examples of what a Cowork task can look like. They show not only how Cowork can work autonomously but also leverage Work IQ for contextual results.
Cowork reviews the week and proposes calendar changes for the teammate to approve.
- Flags conflicts, double-bookings, and meetings the teammate is only optionally required for.
- Proposes declines, reschedules, and focus blocks.
- Acts on each item once the teammate approves.
This is a strong first scenario for the team: every teammate has the problem, the inputs sit entirely on their own calendar, and the approval checkpoint makes it low-risk.
Example prompt:
“Review my calendar for next week. Flag any conflicts, double-bookings, or meetings I’m only optionally required for. Propose declines or reschedules for anything that looks low-value, and suggest where I could block focus time. Walk me through each change one at a time and only act after I approve.”
Cowork helps sellers review the pipeline, surfacing what needs attention and taking action deal by deal.
- Pulls a summary of open opportunities from Dynamics 365 Sales.
- Flags at-risk deals based on stalled activity, slipped close dates, or softening commits.
- Recommends an action for each at-risk deal based on deal health.
- Builds a one-page review deck for top commits ahead of reviews.
This is recurring, multi-app work with direct customer impact, which is why the approval checkpoint matters most in this scenario.
Cowork builds the onboarding package piece by piece, sequencing day-one blockers first.
- Pulls the new hire’s role and start date from HR data.
- Checks pending access and equipment.
- Reviews the first two weeks of calendar.
- Works through the gaps: welcome email, introductory 1:1s, 30/60/90-day plan, reading folder, Teams channel introduction post.
This is high coordination work that managers usually spread across weeks, compressed into a single working session.
Effective prompting with Cowork
Most Cowork outcomes depend on how clearly you scope your request. A prompt like “clean up my calendar” leaves too much open to interpretation, so Cowork has to guess what you want, which shapes the results you get. Be specific about what success looks like when you ask. Start with this guide:
- Outcome: One sentence describing what done looks like.
- Inputs: The specific people, files, sites, or time ranges the task should use.
- Definition of done: The concrete deliverable, e.g., an email sent, a document saved in OneDrive, a meeting on the calendar.
- Constraints: Things to avoid or honor, e.g., do not contact customers, keep it under one page, use the FY27 template.
- Approval scope: Which actions the user wants to review explicitly, beyond the default checkpoints.
Example, before:
“Help me prep for my offsite next week.”
Example, after:
“Outcome: A briefing pack and a draft agenda for the offsite on June 12. Inputs: The offsite invite, the three pre-reads I attached to it, and emails from the offsite distribution list in the last two weeks. Definition of done: A one-page Word doc saved to my OneDrive Offsite folder, and a draft agenda emailed to my direct reports for feedback. Constraints: No external attendees. Approval scope: Default — review the email before sending.”
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and is available in Copilot tenants. IT administrators control who can access it and can deploy and pin it using standard Copilot governance tools.
Getting started with Cowork: what you’ll see
If Cowork is turned on for you, select the Cowork toggle in Microsoft 365 Copilot to jump in. Don’t see the toggle at all? Contact your IT admin to get access.
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1. Finding Cowork: the toggle
The Cowork toggle sits at the top of your left navigation in Microsoft 365 Copilot, next to Home. Select Cowork to switch into the experience.
Learn morearrow_maximize
2. When Cowork is ready for you
Selecting it opens your personalized homepage with suggested tasks tailored to your recent work.
Learn morearrow_maximize
3. When you need to request access
If you can see the Cowork toggle, but it isn't switched on for you yet, selecting it opens a brief overview of what Cowork does with a one-click Request access button. Once your request is approved, you're ready to go.
Learn morearrow_maximize
4. When you reach a usage limit
When you reach your usage limit, you can request more credits by clicking on ``Request more``. Once your admin approves, you're notified both in the product and by email.
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How Cowork is different from Copilot
- Delegation, not prompting: Copilot chat responds to one prompt at a time. Cowork shifts from prompt to whole projects. You define the outcome. Cowork returns completed work.
- Task continuity: Cowork holds context across steps and sessions, so it can work on tasks that run for minutes to hours. That means multi-step business processes like pipeline reviews, onboarding, and account research can be handled end-to-end, not just the single prompt pieces of them.
- Grounded in your real work, not generic outputs: Work IQ, the intelligence layer that personalizes Copilot to you and your organization, grounds every job in the systems your business already runs on, so the work reflects real context.
What you need to know about Cowork
- Partner plugins: Cowork works with the tools your teams already use, including monday.com, Miro, and Harvey, so they can hand off work that spans beyond Microsoft 365.
- Security and governance: Nothing new to stand up. Cowork runs on the Microsoft 365 controls you already have, inheriting your permissions, sensitivity labels, and audit settings. Because it acts on your behalf, it previews every action, flags it by risk level, and lets you pause or stop at any point.
- Pricing: A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is a prerequisite for Cowork. Cowork usage is paid for with Copilot Credits, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go or prepaid currency for AI usage-based billing, with usage visible in admin dashboards. Learn more about Copilot Credits.
- Multiple models, matched to your work: Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5. Cowork matches each task to the best-suited model: Anthropic for visual-heavy work like PowerPoint and graphics and OpenAI for deeper writing and formatted documents, so you get the strongest output where it matters most. Users can choose a specific model family in the model picker, or admins can set one for the whole organization.
Where you set direction
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Which teams get Cowork first
Work with your IT admins and Champions to prioritize access for roles where AI delivers the highest ROI — legal, sales, engineering, customer service, and onboarding teams. Cowork saves time on high-volume, repeatable work. Start there, measure the impact, and expand access as results come in.
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IT and security alignment
Cowork uses existing Microsoft 365 controls, but your IT and security teams own the levers: who has access, how the app is deployed, which plugins are allowed, and which sensitivity labels and audit settings apply. Align on these before Cowork shows up in workflows across your organization.
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The bar for autonomy
Cowork is the most autonomous Copilot experience to date. It’s worth being deliberate about where it operates. This is a natural discussion for your AI Council, the cross-functional leadership group that aligns AI adoption to business priorities and sets guardrails for responsible use. The Council can decide which categories of work it’s appropriate for, what guardrails apply, and how you measure whether it’s working.
money
Budget and enablement
Cowork usage runs on Copilot Credits. This is a budgeting and technical decision. Partner with your IT admins and Champions to switch on for the right users. Work with Finance and your C-suite to fund the credits those teams will need. Use this Customer Cowork Estimator to help size your budget.
Your role as an AI Leader
- Demonstrate: Use Cowork yourself. Pick a scenario, run it end-to-end, and share what you handed off.
- Lead: Pick one to three priority scenarios for your organization, then brief your AI Council on why those and what success looks like. Strong starting points are customer prep, pipeline and sales, and inbox and calendar triage.
- Reinforce: Send the launch announcement to your organization, including the chosen priority scenarios. Then make it a regular habit in your team meetings: ask what people handed off to Cowork, and call out specific examples by name.
- Measure: Pick a few simple signals to track, like how many people use Cowork and what they hand off to it. Set your baseline now, then check it regularly to watch usage grow. Tie these back to the success measures your AI Council set.
Watch how it works
Cowork moves you work from to-do to done.
Try it out with the Prompt Gallery
Find and use ready-to-run prompts
Explore what Copilot can do with our most popular prompts.
Pipeline review
Help me work my pipeline. Please review my open opportunities…
New hire onboarding
Help me onboard my new hire. Please review their first two weeks…
Prep for a meeting
“Help me prepare for an upcoming meeting. Please review my…
Organize my inbox
“Help me organize my inbox. Please review my email from Outlook…
Where to find Cowork
Communities
Microsoft Developer Community
Where developers connect, learn, and build solutions on Microsoft platforms.
Get connectedGo further
AI Skills Navigator
Find interest-based skilling playlists.
Advanced resources
Advanced resources for IT Pros and admins, Champions and Adoption Managers, and Leadership.
Learning hub
Explore our collection of skilling courses for Copilot and agents for IT Pros and Developers.
A New Model for AI Spend
Funding variable AI work is a new discipline for most finance organizations, and adoption is accelerating. The FinOps Foundation, the Linux Foundation’s industry body for technology cost management, reports that 98% of organizations now manage AI spend, up from 31% two years prior, and that AI cost management is the top skill their teams need to develop.
As a finance leader, you already fund Microsoft 365 Copilot as an enterprise capability. Cowork is your next decision: it shifts AI from assisting to executing. That changes what you fund and how it’s priced, moving from a fixed per-seat license to a variable investment that scales with the work you run. As agents take on execution, funding Cowork becomes a capital-allocation decision about which work earns the investment.
| Copilot | Cowork | |
|---|---|---|
| What you fund | AI capability across the organization | Execution of the work itself |
| The cost model | Fixed, per seat | Variable, by usage |
| How spend scales | With headcount | With the work you run |
How Cowork reshapes work across your business
It executes multi-step work across Microsoft 365, completing workflows that coordinate across tools, data, and teams. A team assigns an outcome, and Cowork operates across Microsoft 365 connected systems and your business data, and returns a completed result.
Examples include:
- Pipeline reviews that pull inputs, surface risk, and produce a leadership-ready summary
- Onboarding processes that coordinate tasks across systems and timelines
- Planning workflows that collect inputs from across teams and deliver a final, review-ready output
How Cowork changes your cost model
Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing remains the foundation. Cowork introduces usage-based spend through Copilot Credits. Cost reflects the workflows your teams run rather than access alone.
Credit spend varies based on the volume and complexity of workflows run through Cowork, giving you a more direct connection between spend and operational activity. Business units of similar size can show different spend patterns based on how they use Cowork.
A workflow’s cost scales with its complexity, the systems and data it touches, and the actions it takes. Heavier reasoning and higher-quality outputs draw on more capable models and cost more than simple retrieval.
How Cowork is billed
Cowork is metered in Copilot Credits, a single pooled currency governed at the tenant level. Cost scales with the work performed, not the number of seats. This gives you direct control over where AI investment goes and what it returns. Credits are funded two ways, and most organizations use both.
| Prepaid | Pay-as-you-go | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Predictable, committed usage | Flexibility to scale up or down |
| Term | Lowest per-credit cost | $0.01 USD per credit |
| Cost | Sets your budgeted baseline | Absorbs pilots, spikes, and seasonality |
| How spend scales | With headcount | With the work you run |
AI spend becomes a managed investment that scales with results. Capacity can be allocated, capped, and redirected as workflows prove their value. Budgets and limits are set centrally, keeping consumption visible and controlled. Existing work continues without disruption.
Governing Cowork spend
Budget setting and guardrails
Cowork spend aligns directly to usage and is managed in the Microsoft 365 admin center, using the same governance controls your organization already uses. That shifts budgeting from headcount to workflows. Investment is defined by business scenarios, allocated capacity, and how usage is allowed to expand.
You set budget, prioritization, and guardrails at the executive level. Those decisions are implemented through group-level access, credit allocation, and billing policies that control Cowork use. Budgets, limits, and alerts enforce those decisions. Spend can be actively managed and adjusted because usage is metered and visible in real time.
Visibility into usage across teams
Cowork usage is visible across the organization at the enterprise (tenant), business unit (group), and user level. This provides a clear view of consumption and how it evolves over time.
Because usage is metered and observable, spend can be traced to the team or user that ran it. This ties cost to actual usage rather than seat count alone.
At the leadership level, this visibility turns usage data into a management input. It shows where investment is concentrated, how spend aligns to teams and priorities, and where spend may expand.
Fund the right work and measure outcomes
Setting investment criteria is a shared responsibility between finance and IT. Finance sets the priorities, budgets, and outcomes that matter. IT implements those decisions through policy, execution, and ongoing reporting. Cowork spend reflects how usage-based investment is allocated across the enterprise. Finance leaders set the criteria for where that investment goes, what outcomes it must support, and what evidence is needed before usage expands.
The strongest candidates are workflows that:
- require coordination across systems, data, and inputs
- recur consistently across the enterprise
- produce outputs that drive decisions or downstream action
These are the scenarios where Copilot Cowork, operating across Microsoft 365, executes multi-step work and returns outputs that can be governed, reused, and evaluated against business priorities.
Every workflow is an investment decision. Success means concentrating funding on the workflows that create the most value, and using data to decide which ones qualify before spend scales.
A defined baseline gives finance and business leaders the data to make that decision. This includes:
- the current effort required to complete the workflow
- the output Cowork is expected to produce
- the change in throughput, coordination, or cycle time once the workflow is delegated
- historical and projected usage patterns for comparable work
This creates a clear, data-driven basis for deciding whether a workflow merits continued or expanded investment.
Forrester’s commissioned Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft 365 Copilot study projects 116% ROI and $19.7M NPV* for a composite enterprise on Microsoft 365 Copilot, and early adopters are scaling on those results: Lloyds Banking Group (30,000 licenses, 93% daily usage) and Allegis Group (150,000 hours and $1.5M saved).
*These reflect per-seat Microsoft 365 Copilot, not Cowork usage; Cowork-specific ROI will be quantified once the ROI Assessment Tool and ~90 days of data are available.
Usage data shows which workflows are running, how often they run, and where consumption is concentrated. Outcome signals show whether those workflows produce results that support continued funding. As Cowork scales, funding decisions move from upfront estimates to observed performance. Together, those signals help finance leaders determine where to expand investment, where to refine scope, and where to constrain usage before spend grows further.
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Where to find Cowork
Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and is available in Copilot tenants. IT administrators control who can access it and can deploy and pin it using standard Copilot governance tools.
Getting started with Cowork: what you’ll see
If Cowork is turned on for you, select the Cowork toggle in Microsoft 365 Copilot to jump in. Don’t see the toggle at all? Contact your IT admin to get access.
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1. Finding Cowork: the toggle
The Cowork toggle sits at the top of your left navigation in Microsoft 365 Copilot, next to Home. Select Cowork to switch into the experience.
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2. When Cowork is ready for you
Selecting it opens your personalized homepage with suggested tasks tailored to your recent work.
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3. When you need to request access
If you can see the Cowork toggle, but it isn't switched on for you yet, selecting it opens a brief overview of what Cowork does with a one-click Request access button. Once your request is approved, you're ready to go.
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4. When you reach a usage limit
When you reach your usage limit, you can request more credits by clicking on ``Request more``. Once your admin approves, you're notified both in the product and by email.
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