Microsoft Copilot Cowork is an AI assistant that can take actions on your behalf across your Microsoft 365 environment, with your approval at every important step.

Instead of just suggesting what you could do, Cowork actually does the work you describe, such as:

• Emails in Outlook: Drafts, replies, forwards, and sends messages.
• Meetings and calendar: Schedules meetings using natural language (for example, “set up a 30-minute check-in with Alex tomorrow at 2 PM”), adds attendees, moves events, and helps resolve conflicts.
• Documents and content: Creates and edits Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs.
• Teams communication: Posts in Teams channels and chats, including 1:1 and group conversations.
• Search and research: Searches across your organization’s documents and messages, and performs deep research that synthesizes information from multiple sources into comprehensive reports.
• File management: Browses and organizes files in OneDrive and SharePoint, including creating folders and reorganizing existing content.
• Briefings and summaries: Prepares daily briefings and meeting intelligence summaries so you can walk into meetings better prepared.

Cowork is available for both work or school accounts (generally available) and personal accounts (currently in preview). You can access it in a browser at m365.cloud.microsoft, in the Microsoft Copilot desktop app (Windows and Mac), and in the Microsoft Copilot mobile app (iOS and Android).

Cowork is designed so that you stay in control of every important action.

Here’s how control and oversight work in practice:

• Step-by-step visibility: Cowork shows each step in your session, so you can follow along as it works through your request.
• Approval before sensitive actions: Before sending an email, posting in Teams, or scheduling a meeting, Cowork pauses and asks for your approval. The button label clearly matches the action (for example, Send or Post).
• Risk indicators: Medium- and high-risk actions are flagged with a risk level indicator so you can make an informed decision.
• Flexible control options: You can:
• Approve or cancel individual actions.
• Use a dropdown option to skip future prompts for similar low-risk actions if you’re comfortable.
• Pause a session at any time and resume when you’re ready.
• Cancel the current task entirely if you want to stop what Cowork is doing.
• Review and refine results: After Cowork finishes, you can review documents, check sent messages, download files, and ask it to make edits or adjustments.
• Feedback loop: You can rate responses, leave comments on documents, and share general feedback to help refine how Cowork supports you.

Behind the scenes, Cowork adheres to the data protection policies outlined in Privacy, security, and compliance in Microsoft OneDrive, so its actions align with your organization’s data governance approach.

Cowork uses a set of specialized skills to handle different types of work, and you can extend it further with custom skills and plugins.

Built-in skills include:

• Productivity and content: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF
• Communication and scheduling: Email, Scheduling, Calendar Management, Meetings, Daily Briefing
• Information and insights: Enterprise Search, Deep Research, Communications, Adaptive Cards

As Cowork loads skills during a session, you see them appear in the side panel, so you know which capabilities are active for your current task.

Custom skills

• You can create your own custom skills to match your team’s processes or domain-specific needs.
• Cowork automatically discovers your custom skills at the start of each session.
• You can create up to 50 custom skills, giving you room to reimagine how recurring or specialized tasks are handled.

Plugins from the Microsoft 365 App Store

• Cowork supports plugins that add new skills and connectors.
• Plugins can provide specialized expertise (for example, financial analysis or legal research) or connect Cowork to external data sources and services.
• Your organization’s admin can deploy plugins broadly so everyone benefits from the same extended capabilities.

Together, built-in skills, custom skills, and plugins let you reshape how work flows through Microsoft 365—moving from manual, repetitive tasks to more automated, AI-assisted processes tailored to your organization.