Existing Copilot Licences

Microsoft 365 Copilot already works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, grounded in your own data through Microsoft Graph. In Word it drafts, rewrites and summarises documents, in Excel it analyses data and builds formulas and visuals, in PowerPoint it builds and edits presentations, in Outlook it drafts emails and summarises threads, and in Teams it summarises and transcribes meetings up to 30 days back and captures action items. Prompts and responses carry the same contractual protections as your emails in Exchange and your files in SharePoint.

Growth to Copilot Cowork

Copilot Cowork goes beyond chat: you describe a task, and Cowork sends emails, schedules meetings, creates Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, posts in Teams, searches your organisation and manages files in OneDrive and SharePoint, with every action approved by you first. Prompts can be put on a schedule so recurring tasks run automatically, and event-driven tasks start when something happens, such as a new email arriving. Beyond that, Microsoft Agents stand ready: focused versions of Copilot that act as their own AI assistants and automate business processes.

Control With Agent 365

Agent 365 is the control plane through which you observe, secure and govern every agent. During onboarding, security teams set up policy templates that IT teams apply as each agent starts, so governance and compliance hold from day one. Microsoft Entra gives you full visibility into every agent identity and enforces least-privilege access through Conditional Access, based on risk and resource sensitivity. Microsoft Purview logs and audits every agent interaction for compliance and applies retention and deletion policies to the content an agent creates.
Copilot Drafts For You
Copilot drafts in Word and Excel, writes Outlook mail, and summarises Teams meetings, grounded in your data
You Approve Live Writes
Recurring and event-driven runs happen on their own, and you approve anything that writes to a live system
Every Agent Visible
Entra gives each agent its own identity, so every action traces back to that identity by name

From Licence to Cowork and Agent 365

Existing Copilot Licences 2 steps
01

Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint

In Word, Microsoft 365 Copilot drafts, rewrites and summarises documents. In Excel it analyses data, builds formulas and visuals, and delivers insights. In PowerPoint it builds and edits presentations from prompts or existing content, including images and layout.
02

Copilot in Outlook and Teams

In Outlook, Copilot drafts emails, summarises threads and gives coaching tips on clarity, sentiment and tone. In Teams it summarises and transcribes meetings up to 30 days back and captures action items, grounded in your own data through Microsoft Graph.
Growth to Copilot Cowork 2 steps
03

Cowork Takes On Tasks

You describe a task, and Copilot Cowork sends emails, schedules meetings, creates Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, posts in Teams, searches your organisation and manages files in OneDrive and SharePoint, with every action approved by you first.
04

Schedules, Triggers and Agents

Prompts can be put on a schedule so recurring tasks run automatically, and event-driven tasks start when something happens, such as a new email arriving. Up to 50 custom skills extend Cowork, and Microsoft Agents automate business processes.
Control With Agent 365 2 steps
05

Onboarding With Policy Templates

Security teams set up policy templates during onboarding that IT teams apply to every agent, so governance and compliance hold from day one. Microsoft Entra gives full visibility into every agent identity and enforces least-privilege access through Conditional Access.
06

Audit and Data Lifecycle With Purview

Microsoft Purview logs and audits every agent interaction for compliance reviews and forensic investigations. It also applies retention and deletion policies to the content an agent creates, so data persists only as long as it is actually needed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot, and what gets added to it?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft's assistant across Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, grounded in your data through Microsoft Graph. The layer added on top is what turns it into daily output: recurring chores packaged as Cowork skills a non-engineer triggers, a scheduled operating loop with gates on what runs unattended, transactional mail through Graph inside your own tenant, and the enablement program that leaves the team running it.
How does an automation reach someone who is not an engineer?
Through the Cowork skill contract: a kebab-case folder whose name matches its SKILL.md definition file exactly, placed under Documents/Cowork/skills/ in OneDrive so the desktop experience picks it up, with companion files carrying the detail. The description decides whether it triggers, so each skill is run and tuned until it fires on the phrasing people use. A pack bundles a command, a house-style skill and an internal connector into one installable unit tracked in version control.
What is safe to put on a schedule?
Read-only reporting and preparation. The five patterns worked end to end in the enablement labs, each against a runnable sample system, are a weekly client report from a pipeline spreadsheet with a Teams notification, a Friday knowledge-base freshness report, weekly meeting prep from a live calendar connector, a monthly report from a standing Project, and a weekly ordering run across three mock supplier portals and a legacy desktop application. Anything that mutates a live system stays deliberate and verified, with a hard approval gate on irreversible tools and boundary rules stress-tested against adversarial prompts.
Can transactional mail run without an SMTP relay or a mail vendor?
Yes. Mail sends through Microsoft Graph from a mailbox in your own tenant using app-only client credentials, with the SendMail application permission and admin consent, and nothing else in the path. The same recipe runs in production behind this site and was reused verbatim on a customer contact form. The signature specification and the mailing automation exist separately: an automated Outlook signature rollout has not been built.
How do change requests get handled once this is running?
The email is the specification. A request arrives as a plain office mail, is pulled and analysed with Microsoft 365 mail intelligence inside the working session, and becomes a documented work item in the same sitting. It is implemented in an agent session and deployed to an isolated preview environment with test data and its own addresses, so what comes back is a working URL to review, promoted after your review.
Does the Microsoft Copilot app rename change security, compliance or enterprise controls?
No. Security, compliance, privacy and enterprise controls are unchanged by the rename. The Microsoft Copilot app rolls out to worldwide mobile and web from mid-August 2026 and to Windows and Mac from mid-September, with the web URL moving to copilot.cloud.microsoft and an automatic redirect from late August. Visual cues separate work and personal accounts: a different background colour per account type and a Work label under the profile in the navigation pane, alongside the existing green data protection shield. Tenant policies, admin controls and existing configurations carry over.
What governs an agent once it is running in the tenant?
Agent 365 costs $15 per user and gives one control plane for agent inventory, permissions, behaviour and activity across the tenant. Entra Agent ID gives each agent its own identity under the same access policies as human users, so an action taken by an agent has a named subject. Purview Audit captures human-to-agent, agent-to-agent and agent-to-tool interactions.