Microsoft unveiled Copilot Cowork, a new AI assistant that can run tasks in the background, create documents, and work across Microsoft 365 apps, the company announced Monday.
The product integrates technology from Anthropic’s Claude family of models into Microsoft’s existing Copilot assistant, the latest example of Microsoft expanding beyond its tight partnership with OpenAI. Anthropic already offers Claude Cowork through its own platform.
It comes as Microsoft tries to boost adoption of Copilot, which remains a relatively small fraction of its commercial user base amid big investments in AI infrastructure.
Copilot Cowork is part of what Microsoft is calling Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also announced a new $99-per-user Microsoft 365 E7 tier launching May 1 — a new level of its technology licensing program for businesses — which bundles Copilot, identity management tools, and a new $15 Agent 365 product for managing AI agents.
The E7 tier costs 65% more than the current $60 E5 subscription.
“Customers have told us E5 alone is no longer enough; they do not want multiple tools stitched together, they want one trusted solution,” Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, wrote in a blog post.
Microsoft says Copilot Cowork can handle multiple tasks simultaneously, pulling from a user’s calendar, email, and files to complete work without constant supervision.
“Copilot Chat already makes it easy to research topics and think through ideas, and Copilot Cowork allows you to take action and complete activities in the background so you can get more work done on a regular basis,” said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s president of Business Applications & Agents, in a demo video.
In the video, Lamanna showed Copilot Cowork analyzing a month of meetings with direct reports, compiling customer notes from a business trip, and generating a competitive analysis with accompanying Word document and Excel spreadsheet.
The company emphasized the role of Work IQ, its intelligence layer that connects Copilot to a user’s work patterns, relationships, and content across Microsoft 365.
Copilot Cowork runs within Microsoft 365’s security and compliance boundaries, with actions and outputs auditable by default. Microsoft is pitching its multi-model approach as a differentiator, saying it will choose the right model for each task regardless of provider.
The announcement drew mixed reactions. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of “Co-Intelligence” who studies AI adoption, raised questions on LinkedIn.
“Will it continue to use lower-end models or older models without telling you the way Copilot does?” Mollick wrote. He also asked whether Microsoft would keep the product updated, noting that Anthropic’s standalone Cowork product “was built in a couple of weeks using Claude Code and is being updated and evolving quickly.”
Microsoft, he added, “has a tendency to launch a leading product and then let it sit for awhile,” noting that he was “curious about whether their pacing will change.”
Copilot Cowork is available in limited research preview and will roll out to Microsoft’s Frontier program later this month.
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