n what Microsoft is calling the third wave of Copilot, the company unveiled Copilot Cowork, delving deeper into agentic capabilities.

Copilot Cowork is powered by Work IQ, which the company describes as the “brain” behind Copilot, which understands all your data, context, skills, and tools to provide personalized assistance. The concept is the same as the viral Claude Cowork, allowing M365 users to offload tasks to Copilot, which can then work in the background to execute them pending user approval.

Microsoft provides examples of how users can use it, including:

• Triaging calendar: It can review your Outlook schedule and suggest changes to match priorities, such as flagging low-value meetings and conflicts and proposing changes the user approves.
• Generating content: It can create documents and presentation decks.
• Deep Research: Cowork can research across the company and web sources to provide a well-cited, well-organized summary.

This launch is an attempt to stay competitive with agentic AI tools such as OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. However, there are some key differences in Microsoft’s response, as noted by Gartner research.

“Unlike Claude Cowork, it does not support local computer use, cannot interact directly with local files or applications, and lacks native integrations with third-party tools and services.

These omissions constrain [Copilot] Cowork’s autonomy and limit its ability to operate end-to-end workloads outside Microsoft 365.”

Currently, Copilot Cowork is in Research Preview and being tested with a select group of customers. Microsoft said it will be more broadly available in the Frontier program in late March 2026.

Our Deeper View

When ChatGPT first exploded in popularity, Microsoft was quick to capitalize, offering free access to OpenAI's latest models through its tools, even when OpenAI itself was paywalling them. That strategy worked initially. But Microsoft has been having trouble competing since then. Without developing its own models capable of enabling unique experiences, catching up could be difficult, though not impossible. The talent is there, with a prime example being Microsoft AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, who previously co-founded DeepMind and has been aggressive poaching talent. Nevertheless, Microsoft still needs to find a way to appeal to consumers beyond just bundling Copilot into laptops through OEM deals or its Microsoft 365 business licenses.