Microsoft has given Copilot its biggest makeover yet. It's no longer pitching it as a chatbot sidebar. It wants Copilot to be, in Satya Nadella's words, "a new OS for work."

The new Copilot app, announced on September 25, is built around three pieces: Home, Code, and Autopilot.

Home is the new starting point, where Chat and Cowork live together. Chat handles quick questions and drafts. Cowork is for delegating bigger jobs end to end, like an RFP response or a financial close package. Microsoft is also putting the full Word, Excel, and PowerPoint experience inside Copilot with "Office in Copilot," so documents get created and edited live without jumping between apps. Microsoft says you'll soon be able to just state what you need, and Copilot will route it to Chat, Cowork, or Code on its own.

Code is the one I'm most curious about. Describe an app, tracker, dashboard, or automation in plain English, and Copilot builds it. It's powered by the same underlying tech as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandbox, and can be hosted inside your company's tenant. Microsoft argues that building these small tools is becoming "as basic a skill as writing a memo or modeling a budget."

Autopilot, previously called Scout, is the always-on piece. You give it a name, a role, and a goal, and it watches channels, follows up on threads, and picks projects back up days later "without waiting for a prompt." It runs in the cloud with its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, and you can @mention it in Teams or Outlook like a colleague.

We’re building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task. Today, we’re announcing our biggest update to Copilot to date, bringing four things together:

· Autopilot: proactive and long-running agent built for the enterprise
· Code:… pic.twitter.com/W2ClHHkCK3

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) September 25, 2026

Timing-wise, Home and Code start rolling out to Microsoft's Frontier program in the coming weeks, with Code landing in Frontier at the end of the month. Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. A proactive "Today" view enters private preview in October.

The less flashy but arguably more important change is pricing. Everyday Copilot use, like chat, drafts, and summaries, stays on a fixed per-user licence. But Cowork, Code, Autopilot, and frontier models like Astra and Fable move to usage-based billing. So the more agentic work your company does, the more it pays. Microsoft is pairing that with new "FinOps for AI" tools that let admins set spending policies and see which Cowork tasks deliver the best results.

This fits the cost-conscious Microsoft we wrote about in July, when it swapped GPT-Image out of Office for its own AI to cut GPU bills. Agents that run 24/7 are expensive, and Microsoft clearly isn't planning to eat that cost.

It also puts Microsoft squarely in the always-on agent race alongside Meta's Muse, SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, and whatever OpenAI shows at DevDay. Microsoft says more is coming at Ignite, November 17 to 20.