Microsoft has made Copilot Cowork available through its Frontier programme, and the gap between organisations already testing it and those still relying on basic Copilot features is widening fast.
Microsoft first confirmed it was bringing the technology platform behind Anthropic’s Claude Cowork into Microsoft 365 Copilot in March. That was a research preview limited to a select group of customers. This is the real rollout, and enterprises that want a say in how these capabilities develop need to move quickly.
Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s CMO for AI at Work, has been direct about what this moment represents.
“We really believe right now is an inflection point. The inflection point for us is Copilot taking on these agentic capabilities and going from assistance to real doing.”
To read more about Microsoft’s Wave 3 announcements and the new E7 licence tier, read our earlier coverage here.
How Copilot Cowork executes work across Microsoft 365
Rather than prompting Copilot to generate a document or summarise an email, users describe a desired outcome and Cowork handles the rest. It draws on Work IQ, pulling signals from Outlook, Teams, Excel, and SharePoint to act with full context across a user’s working life. The system creates a plan, runs in the background, and surfaces checkpoints for approval before applying any changes. Users stay in control without needing to manage every step themselves.
Charles Lamanna, President of Business Applications and Agents at Microsoft, summed up the practical difference during a live product demonstration.
“I want to get all the emails, the meetings, the notes that are relevant, and then I want to create a presentation, and I want to go have an Excel overview of product growth and have all that information just generate for me automatically. What’s great about Cowork is it can run for hours, if that’s how long it takes.”
Use cases range from calendar triage and scheduling to full product launch workflows that coordinate competitive analysis in Excel, value proposition documents in Word, and customer pitch decks in PowerPoint, without the user managing a single handoff. Every action runs inside the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant, within existing security and governance boundaries, and every document produced becomes protected enterprise knowledge ready to share.
The Anthropic partnership powering the next generation of Copilot
Cowork is the most visible outcome yet of the deepening relationship between Microsoft and Anthropic. The two companies formalised a $30 billion Azure compute deal in November 2025, and Anthropic has operated as a Microsoft sub-processor since January 2026. Claude is now available in mainline Copilot Chat for Frontier users alongside the latest OpenAI models, with Copilot automatically applying whichever model best suits the task at hand. Spataro explained why that multi-model approach is central to the platform’s long-term value.
“Every 60 days at least, there’s a new king of the hill. There’s so much demand for a platform that doesn’t feel like, ‘I have to skip over to the next vendor.’”
Rather than locking into a single provider, Microsoft has built Copilot to route work across models from multiple frontier labs. Lamanna added:
“There’s lots of great models out there. But so much of the work that we do is focused on how do we bring our customers’ data and working environment to the model? And that’s what WorkIQ is all about.”
Researcher’s new Critique feature lifts accuracy by 13.8% on the industry benchmark
Alongside Cowork, Microsoft has announced major enhancements to its Researcher agent, which helps users tackle complex questions by synthesising information and delivering well-reasoned, cited responses. The new Critique feature introduces a two-model workflow: one model drafts a response while a second, drawing on both OpenAI and Anthropic models, reviews it for accuracy and citation quality before the final output reaches the user. A new Model Council feature also lets users compare responses from different models side by side, seeing where they agree, where they diverge, and what each brings to the table.
Microsoft says this approach has lifted Researcher’s score on the DRACO benchmark, the industry standard for deep research quality, by 13.8%. For teams relying on Researcher for competitive analysis, regulatory summaries, or executive briefings, separating generation from evaluation in this way is a meaningful step forward in output reliability.
Capital Group results show what Cowork can deliver at enterprise scale
Capital Group had early access to Copilot Cowork and reported concrete results across planning, scheduling, and preparing for executive reviews. Barton Warner, SVP of Enterprise Technology at the firm, explained what made it credible for enterprise deployment:
“This isn’t about generating content or answers. It’s about taking real action, connecting steps, coordinating tasks, and following through across everyday workflows. Because Cowork operates on our enterprise data and within our security and risk boundaries, we can experiment, learn, and scale with confidence. That allows us to move faster and focus AI in places where it actually delivers value.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot now has 15 million paid seats, with daily active users up tenfold year-over-year and seat growth up more than 160% annually. The number of customers deploying at more than 35,000 seats has tripled in the same period. Even so, paid subscribers still represent just 3.3% of an estimated 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 users, the majority of whom access Copilot Chat at no extra cost. Cowork’s ability to save measurable time on real, multi-step work is Microsoft’s strongest argument yet for converting the rest.
What IT buyers in the UK and EU need to know before rolling out Cowork
Cowork’s Frontier availability sits within Microsoft’s broader Wave 3 announcements, which also include the general availability of Agent 365 on 1 May, the control plane for managing and governing agents across the organisation, priced at $15 per user per month. Alongside it sits the new Microsoft 365 E7 Frontier Suite, which bundles Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Agent 365 into a single SKU at $99 per user, below the $117 combined price of the three components purchased separately.
UK, EU, and EFTA administrators should take one important step before deploying Cowork. The Anthropic sub-processor setting is turned off by default in these regions and must be manually enabled through Copilot settings before users can access the full capability set. Government cloud environments have no access at all. That is a straightforward configuration change, but one worth completing before any internal rollout begins.
Organisations can join the Frontier programme and get started at Microsoft365.com/copilot.
