Microsoft is officially unveiling a redesigned Copilot app that bundles chat, coding and agent capabilities into a single interface and rebrands its Scout assistant as Autopilot. The app centers on three tabs — Home, Code and Autopilot — and aims to position Copilot as “the AI built for work.”
How Copilot’s three tabs work
Home combines Copilot Chat and Cowork as the default landing experience and will include a Today feature that acts as a personalized dashboard for important emails, meeting requests, Teams threads and more. “Home is where you get your bearings, keeping you grounded and moving forward: review recent activity, get suggestions on what Copilot can help with, and pick up work right where you left off,” explains Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft.
The Code tab is a notable addition for a work-focused Copilot. It will let users create apps, trackers, dashboards or automations and share them as cloud-hosted internal apps. According to Microsoft, “Powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, Code runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely within your tenant.”
Autopilot, previously called Scout, is presented as a cloud-based personal AI assistant with its own cloud compute instance that can be tasked to watch Teams channels, run recurring work tasks or handle follow-ups while a user is away. Microsoft emphasizes enterprise controls: “Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, and it’s built on Microsoft IQ so it understands how your organization actually works,” Spataro says. Autopilot will appear in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents and can be @mentioned like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance.
Pricing, models and admin controls
Microsoft will use usage-based billing for the Cowork, Code and Autopilot components, charging for long-running agentic capabilities and for use of models such as Astra and Fable based on consumption. The standard Copilot user subscription license provides Copilot in Chat and within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Microsoft will employ an auto model picker to match the model to each task, and IT admins are expected to use Microsoft’s new FinOps for AI to manage AI spend and control agentic usage.
Rollout and positioning
The Home and Code tabs will begin rolling out to Microsoft’s Frontier program for early access AI features “in the coming weeks,” while Autopilot will enter private preview later this month. Code will also be available in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
Microsoft casts the new Copilot as a foundational productivity platform: Spataro says, “Just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Copilot “a new operating system” and said, “We’re building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task.” (Nadella’s comments were added in an update on September 25.)
Despite that positioning, the company acknowledges a different commercial context: Copilot has underperformed in the consumer space compared with rivals such as Claude and ChatGPT, though Microsoft’s core commercial customers are gradually showing interest. The company also faces competition from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, and it remains to be seen whether this work-focused Copilot will help Microsoft close those gaps.
