Microsoft Copilot rebuilt with Home, Code, Autopilot tabs

Microsoft's announcement on September 25 restructures Copilot around three named surfaces. Home is the starting screen that gathers Chat and the task-delegating "Copilot Cowork" announced in March, and Microsoft says Copilot will soon route work to the right feature without the user choosing one. "Office in Copilot" embeds Word, Excel and PowerPoint so files created there remain editable and synced with the individual apps. Code lets people build apps, dashboards and automations by describing them in natural language, using the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, and runs them under IT control inside a company's own Microsoft 365 environment through the newly previewed Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime.

Autopilot is the agent Microsoft previously called Scout, built on the open-source agent framework OpenClaw. Microsoft calls it a "digital teammate": given a name, role and goals, it monitors channels, follows up on threads, handles recurring work and resumes projects paused days earlier without waiting for prompts. Because it is cloud-hosted, it keeps running while a user sleeps, holds its own identity, memory, computer and workspace inside the tenant, sits on "Microsoft IQ," and can be summoned with an @ mention in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents. Permissions, auditing and governance still apply.

The pricing split is where this lands for buyers: everyday AI stays on per-user licenses, while agents and frontier models move to usage-based billing. Whether the redesign pays off for Microsoft may hinge on how smoothly that staged rollout and billing shift go for the IT teams who manage seats and spend, and on whether non-developers actually build and share apps under IT oversight.