Microsoft Rebuilds Copilot Around Home, Code, Autopilot: 5 Things To Know

‘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,’ says Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer.

A new Home starting point, a Today command center and a Code tool for creating applications with natural-language prompts are among the ways Microsoft is transforming how users interact with its flagship artificial intelligence product.

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.

The product experience updates come as Microsoft reconfigures how users buy the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses aimed at small and midsize businesses. Microsoft is shifting the licenses to usage-based by default for eligible services starting Nov. 2.

Copilot Business is aimed at small and midsize businesses with up to 300 seats per tenant.

John Snyder, CEO of Durham, N.C.-based Microsoft solution provider Net Friends, told CRN in an interview that his company has been working on ensuring AI administration is fully covered by its client agreements. The solution provider is taking on the responsibility of keeping clients’ AI infrastructure well-configured, handling provisioning and deprovisioning, and removing the complexity of AI systems from clients. Such is the evolution of solution provider work in the AI era.

“This is where all MSPs need to be,” he said.

Here’s more of what you need to know about Microsoft’s changes to Copilot capabilities.

Copilot’s Home, Today Experiences

The Copilot product and capability changes Microsoft disclosed Friday include three new capabilities in Copilot—Home, Code and Autopilot, a new version of Microsoft’s Scout. All three follow usage-based billing.

Home will roll out “in the coming weeks” through Microsoft’s Frontier program, according to the 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.

Today 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.

Diving deeper into the three Copilot capabilities Microsoft unveiled Friday, 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 Code on its own.

In the Home tab, Office in Copilot gives users access to popular Microsoft productivity applications including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can create and update real, editable files that remain synchronized as colleagues edit them.

Users should also avoid broken formatting, stray versions and context rebuilding in another application.

In Home, users can review recent activity, get suggestions on how to use Copilot and pick up work where they left off.

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.

Code, Autopilot Aim To Push Copilot Beyond Chat

Code should enter the Frontier program at the end of the month with broad availability “in the coming weeks.” Autopilot should enter private preview at the end of September.

Among other product availability news Microsoft revealed is that it plans to make a new plug-in registry generally available by the end of September, unifying Microsoft, partner and custom-built plug-ins into one catalog and simplifying 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.

The Code capability is powered by the technology underlying Microsoft coding assistant GitHub Copilot, according to the vendor. Users can turn ideas 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.

Code runs in sandboxed environments, with users having the ability to host it in secure tenants.

And the third capability, Autopilot, 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.

Autopilot can set and manage supplier review processes, build schedules, build workback plans, handle meeting preparation and follow-ups and more, according to Microsoft. This capability is cloud-hosted and can keep working even when the worker isn’t monitoring it.

This capability lives in users’ tenants and has its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. It leverages context from the Microsoft IQ unified intelligence platform and can show up in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents when colleagues tag it with the @ sign.

Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Managed Runtime

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.

The Managed Runtime SDK acts as a connective layer between the code users create and the Copilot Managed Runtime host, according to the vendor. And a command-line interface support applies to the full development life cycle, not just for packaging the finished app.

Developers can generate typed services for working with connectors from TypeScript, preview applications during development, deploy and version apps through the same toolchain and leverage the SDK as a secure bridge between the application and services exposed through the host, among other activities, according to Microsoft.

“The Copilot Managed Runtime host gives teams a shared enterprise foundation around the apps they create, bringing together Microsoft-operated cloud hosting, identity, governed data access, and life-cycle management,” David Blyth, Microsoft vice president and general manager for managed apps and agents, said in a statement Friday. “Instead of assembling that foundation for each application, teams can focus on putting useful apps into people’s hands, with IT retaining control over how those apps run, and who is able to build over which enterprise data sources.”

Cost Management, Agent 365

Microsoft disclosed other new capabilities rolling out for Copilot, with the news including 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.

Administrators will receive the ability to match models to users, groups and scenarios, with a Cowork option rolling out now and more workloads to come, according to Microsoft.

Administrators can see which scenarios drive credit consumption and what they produced for evaluating what work to keep the same, expand or optimize.

Microsoft Graph API 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.

Some capabilities starting in usage-based billing can move under license use as they get better, more efficient and more economical, according to Microsoft. They also might have a usage limit so that users can still experiment with the models.

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.

API access should allow administrators to manage spending policies at scale. They can route credit requests from end users into existing approval and automation workflows. And they can set which model families are available to different user groups.

Managers can see which Cowork tasks generate the best outcomes and decide on where to keep usage, expand it or change it.

FinOps For AI, Partner Incentives

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. Administrators have the ability to set the model families available to various groups of users. Those settings also inform the models the Auto routing feature selects from. Auto weighs accuracy, speed and cost on each user request when picking the right model for a job, according to Microsoft.

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.

Microsoft Partner Chief Dezen pointed to recent partner resources to help with converting clients to paid Copilot deployments. Microsoft’s “Copilot in 30” program that launched in August, for example, is aimed at small and midsize businesses.

The program offers 25 seats of 30-day trials of Copilot Business licenses with no-cost evaluation experiences and partner resources around how to move customers through Cowork, Code and agent-based scenarios as clients add more AI processes to their workflow.

The Copilot Cowork CSP Activation Incentive that launched Sept. 1 awards solution providers—ones that work with distributors and ones that are direct-bill Microsoft partners—could also make the work easier for solution providers by awarding them as clients activate and use Cowork.