- Microsoft and Anthropic reveal Copilot Cowork
- Anthropic AI platform gives Copilot the ability to really dig deep into work tasks
- The tool will be able to cover the entire Microsoft 365 platform
Microsoft has revealed a major update to Copilot that it says will allow the AI assistant to truly engage with your work tasks for the first time, thanks to its combination with Anthropic’s Claude Cowork platform.
The company has introduced Copilot Cowork, an enhanced platform integrated with Anthropic’s work automation service that aims to take AI from an interested observer to a full helper.
Or as the company puts it in a new blog post, “complete tasks, run workflows, and perform work on your behalf… That’s what Copilot Cowork is designed to do: help Copilot take action, not just chat.”
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Cowork copilot
“If you’ve used Copilot, you’ve seen how quickly it can help you find a response or compose an email,” the company’s blog post adds. “The next step is equally important: turning that intention into real actions in Microsoft 365.”
Microsoft says users will be able to describe the outcome they want, with Cowork looking across its Microsoft 365 suite of office software, including Outlook, Teams, Excel and more to learn about the task at hand.
You’ll then turn this learning into an action plan, running in the background as your workday progresses, but offering a series of checkpoints so you can check your progress, make changes, or pause the action at any time.
“Copilot works independently without you giving up control,” Microsoft says, providing a number of examples of where Cowork could be useful, such as sorting out a full work calendar to reschedule meetings and create focus time, or creating a release plan for a new project, creating a presentation, benchmarking competition in Excel, or managing workloads on a team.
It could also be useful for researching a new client, searching the web for news and reports with key information, before summarizing the results and then preparing for your meeting with the client by creating a slide presentation with information drawn from your emails, meetings and files.
Microsoft says Cowork operates within the security and governance boundaries of Microsoft 365, so its identity and compliance policies will be applied by default. Cowork will also run in a protected and isolated cloud environment, meaning tasks can continue to progress securely even if you move between devices.
Copilot Cowork is currently being tested with a limited set of customers in Research Preview, and Microsoft says it will be available more widely in the Frontier program in late March 2026.
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