Microsoft Copilot Cowork is an AI assistant that can take actions on your behalf across your Microsoft 365 environment, while keeping you in control.

Instead of just suggesting what you could do, Cowork actually does the work once you approve it. You describe what you need in natural language, and it can:

• Send emails: Draft, reply, forward, and send messages in Outlook.
• Schedule meetings: Create calendar events, add attendees, and organize your day.
• Create documents: Build Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and PDFs from scratch or refine existing files.
• Post in Teams: Send updates to channels and chats, including 1:1 and group conversations.
• Search your organization: Find documents, messages, and information across Microsoft 365.
• Manage files: Browse and organize files in OneDrive and SharePoint, including creating and reorganizing folders.
• Conduct deep research: Pull from multiple sources and compile comprehensive reports and analyses.
• Prepare briefings: Generate daily briefings and meeting intelligence summaries so you start the day informed.
• Automate recurring work: Run prompts on a schedule or trigger tasks when events happen (like receiving an email or Teams message).

As it works, Cowork shows each step in your session so you can follow along. You can interrupt, steer, or pause at any time. Cowork is available for both work or school accounts (generally available) and personal accounts (currently in preview).

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

Here’s how control and oversight work:

• Approval before sensitive actions: Before Cowork sends an email, posts in Teams, or schedules a meeting, it pauses and asks for your approval. The button label clearly matches the action (for example, Send or Post).
• Risk level indicators: For medium- and high-risk actions, Cowork shows a risk level indicator so you understand the impact before approving.
• Skip future prompts (when appropriate): A dropdown option lets you skip similar approval prompts in the future if you’re comfortable with that type of action.
• Pause, resume, cancel: You can pause a session at any time, resume when you’re ready, or cancel the current task entirely.
• Step-by-step visibility: Cowork breaks your request into steps and shows them in the session view, so you can see exactly what it’s doing as it works.
• Review results: After a task completes, you can review documents, check messages, and ask Cowork to revise or refine the output.
• Feedback loop: You can rate responses, leave comments on documents, and share general feedback to help improve future results.

From a data standpoint, Cowork adheres to the data protection policies outlined in Privacy, security, and compliance in Microsoft OneDrive, helping you align with your organization’s compliance requirements.

Copilot Cowork uses a skills-based model so it can handle a wide range of work scenarios and help you reimagine how you manage projects and tasks.

Built-in skills

Cowork comes with a set of built-in skills that correspond to specific task types, including:

• Content and documents: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Communications.
• Email and scheduling: Email, Scheduling, Calendar Management.
• Meetings and briefings: Meetings, Daily Briefing.
• Search and research: Enterprise Search, Deep Research.
• Interactive experiences: Adaptive Cards.

As Cowork loads skills during a session, you see them in a side panel so you know which capabilities are active.

Custom skills

• You can create up to 50 custom skills tailored to your team’s workflows.
• Cowork automatically discovers your custom skills at the start of each session.
• These skills can focus on specific processes, such as project reporting, stakeholder updates, or specialized document creation.

Plugins and external services

• Cowork supports plugins from the Microsoft 365 App Store 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 centrally so everyone benefits from the same extended capabilities.

Automations and task management

• Scheduled prompts: Run prompts on a schedule so recurring tasks (like weekly status emails or regular reports) happen automatically.
• Event-driven tasks: Trigger actions when something happens, such as receiving a specific type of email or a Teams message.
• Task views: Use built-in project and task views to see all your tasks, filter by status, and manage scheduled prompts from the Automations tab.

Where you can use Cowork

• In your browser at m365.cloud.microsoft.
• In the Microsoft Copilot desktop app for Windows and Mac.
• In the Microsoft Copilot mobile app for iPhone and Android.

Together, built-in skills, custom skills, and plugins give you a flexible way to transform and streamline how work gets done across Microsoft 365.