Home, Code, Autopilot Mark Major Microsoft Copilot Overhaul

A Home starting point will roll out ‘in the coming weeks’ while Code should enter the Frontier program at the end of the month with broad availability ‘in the coming weeks,’ according to Microsoft.

Microsoft is adding more capabilities to its Copilot while revamping how users interact with the flagship artificial intelligence tool.

A Home starting point will roll out “in the coming weeks” through Microsoft’s Frontier program, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor. A command center called Today should enter private preview in October in Copilot and is expected to come to Outlook and Teams as well.

One of the new Copilot capabilities, Code, should enter the Frontier program at the end of the month with broad availability “in the coming weeks,” according to Microsoft. And the third capability, Autopilot, should enter private preview at the end of September.

These and other Copilot updates come as Microsoft also revisits the pricing configuration for its Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses aimed at small and midsize businesses, moving the licenses to have usage-based billing on by default for eligible services starting Nov. 2, according to Microsoft.

Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer and corporate vice president of global channel partner sales, positions the new Copilot experience as extending solution provider opportunities beyond individual productivity gains and into more complex use cases, she said in a statement Friday.

“The next evolution of Frontier Transformation is about matching the right mode of intelligence to the task at hand,” Dezen said. “For Microsoft partners, the opportunity extends well beyond the product experience, [reaching] how people use AI, how customers adopt it commercially, and how partners build, extend, secure, govern and manage it.”

CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.

Chris Regan, managing partner at Spring Lake, N.J.-based Microsoft solution provider B&R Business Solutions, told CRN in an interview that a majority of his customers are still staying within the compute included with their licenses, but B&R is increasingly turning on pay-as-you-go services for client users leveraging agents and performing more advanced AI tasks, with B&R setting spending quotas to keep AI budgets in check.

He’s even found himself surprised by the types of users that have leaned heavily into AI agents.

“We are finding that there are users who we would have never expected in a million years that are using this stuff,” Regan said. “They are hitting the quota. And then they’re a week into the month, and then they’re like, ‘I need to increase the quota. I need to increase the quota. I need to increase the quota.’”

Home, Today And A New Copilot Experience

Home is one of three new capabilities in Copilot Microsoft has revealed. All three follow usage-based billing.

Home acts as a new Copilot starting point where users ask Copilot Chat questions, look up information and draft content. While in Home, users can ask Cowork to complete tasks like responding to proposals, creating briefings and more. Soon, Copilot will automatically route queries to Chat, Cowork or one of the other new Copilot capabilities, Code, on its own, according to Microsoft.

The upcoming Today command center shows users what messages they missed in mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks. It also alerts users to what needs immediate attention and what can wait. Today can also write drafts, propose schedule changes and other actions.

Code And Autopilot Push Copilot Beyond Chat

The Code capability is powered by the technology underlying Microsoft coding assistant GitHub Copilot, according to the vendor. Users can turn ideas written in Copilot in natural language into applications, dashboards, automations and workflows through Code. The capability can make persistent desktop widgets, interactive dashboards, cloud-hosted internal applications and more.

And the third capability, Autopilot, a renamed and revamped version of Scout, acts as a persistent, proactive personal agent. Autopilot is cloud-hosted with its own identity, memory and workspace while staying within the permissions and boundaries of the organization.

Users can give Autopilot a name, role and goal. It can watch channels, follow up on threads, run recurring work and pick up projects at a later time even without user prompting, according to Microsoft.

Work IQ, Fabric IQ And Managed Runtime

Alongside the Copilot updates, Microsoft moved its Fabric IQ context layer into general availability through Chat and Cowork.

Fabric IQ integrated with Code will come through Frontier “soon,” according to the vendor.

Work IQ will enter public preview Sept. 30 with rollout throughout October, according to the vendor. It promises to ground Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data and workflows so that Copilot can surface deal histories, support tickets and other data without users switching applications or looking anything up.

Copilot Managed Runtime, now in public preview and accessible inside Code, is hosting infrastructure that supports applications built in Microsoft’s Cowork, Code and Copilot Studio interfaces.

Managed Runtime also offers authorized identity access through Microsoft Entra, automatic version and source control through Git and an integration with Work IQ to simplify product and data access and authorization.

Cost Management, Agent 365 And FinOps

Microsoft’s Copilot news included more workloads under the cost management feature. Cost management now adds Code and Managed Runtime alongside Cowork and Work IQ. Copilot Studio agents will get added in October, with more AI workloads to follow, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Graph APIs can manage spending policies at scale in business intelligence and FinOps tools of choice for automation enablement. And end users themselves can see credit usage, remaining credits and usage history within Copilot for self-management.

Microsoft’s Agent 365 control plane, meanwhile, is extending cost management beyond Cowork and Work IQ APIs to now include Code and Copilot Managed Runtime. Agents built in Copilot Studio should gain support in October.

And Microsoft introduced a cost governance tool called FinOps for AI for solution providers to use with Code and Copilot Managed Runtime. Support for Copilot Studio custom agents is expected in October, according to the vendor.

With the FinOps for AI tool, solution providers can establish budgets, limits and policies for the new usage-based capabilities, according to Microsoft. They can also connect usage and spending to business outcomes when evaluating the products.

In the IQ suite, with Work IQ, solution providers gain the ability to connect systems, knowledge, workflows and business context to power agentic experiences for customers. And Fabric IQ brings in customer data context and more than 20 million semantic models in Microsoft Power BI into the Chat and Cowork interfaces.

Plug-In Registry And New Teams Experiences

Microsoft also plans to make a new plug-in registry generally available by the end of September.

The move aims to unify Microsoft, partner and custom-built plug-ins into one catalog and simplify governance, publishing and discovery, according to the vendor.

Plug-ins bring together AI skills, connectors and capabilities to extend Copilot actions. IT administrators will have the ability to approve and manage plug-ins centrally. Developers can publish once to extend Copilot capabilities across supported experiences.

Teams users will have a private preview by the end of the month for calling Copilot with an @ mention and leveraging the shared context and permissions in the Teams channel, group chat or meeting. Teams users can see why product decisions were made, for example, with background pulled across conversations and a cross-functional review with dependencies, owners, open questions and decisions along the way.

Microsoft may not be “the flashiest AI company out there,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft chief marketing officer for AI at work, wrote in a blog post Wednesday, but the vendor is “purposefully understated, because the work that runs a company isn’t a demo, and it doesn’t reward hype.”

“It rewards systems that show up every day and do the job,” Spataro said. “We build with the conviction that AI should expand human agency, not narrow it—giving your people better tools to do their best work and take on harder problems. Our job is to give you the platform, the economics, and the partnership to choose well, and to make AI matter where it matters most: in the work, and the people that move your business forward.”