Microsoft on March 9 announced Copilot Cowork, an AI agent for Microsoft 365 designed to complete complex, multi-step tasks across the suite’s applications on a user’s behalf. The company said the feature is built with Anthropic’s Claude models, a notable step in Microsoft’s move to use AI from suppliers beyond OpenAI inside its flagship productivity products.
Copilot Cowork is aimed at workflows that span several apps. In Microsoft’s examples, the agent can build a presentation, gather information from multiple files, and schedule meetings, handling the intermediate steps itself rather than returning a draft for the user to finish. It runs in Microsoft’s cloud rather than on the user’s device.
Research preview first
Microsoft said Copilot Cowork will be released as a research preview later in March so that organizations can test its capabilities before any broader rollout. The company has not said when, or whether, it will become generally available or how it will be priced on its own.
The agent is integrated with Microsoft’s enterprise data protection controls and with Work IQ, the layer that gives Copilot context about a company’s people, documents and activity. Microsoft says those integrations are intended to keep sensitive corporate data within an organization’s existing security boundaries, although analysts have pointed out that running Claude inside Microsoft 365 raises questions about data residency that customers will want answered.
A new top-tier license
Alongside Cowork, Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 E7, a new enterprise license tier priced at $99 per user per month and available from May 1. E7 bundles Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent 365, a new platform for deploying, governing and securing AI agents across an organization, on top of the security and compliance tooling in the existing E5 tier.
The pricing puts the full Microsoft AI stack well above the E5 plan it extends, and it signals how the company intends to monetize agents: as a premium layer sold to large enterprises rather than a feature folded into existing subscriptions.
The announcement reflects a broader shift across the industry from chat assistants toward agents that carry out work end to end. For Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, the decision to build a headline feature on Claude also underlines its stated intention to remain model-agnostic as it assembles those agents.
