Will the world move away from Office? A big change in office work

This is how Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, sees the world, saying at the latest Microsoft event about Copilot that it will be a “new operating system for work.” And it looks like this:

Microsoft wants to change the business version of Copilot from a chatbot into an office work center.

In practice, the idea is that the AI ​​assistant is no longer just a window for asking questions, but a permanent software layer that connects the Office suite, developer tools and autonomous AI agents.

Copilot will not replace Windows, but it is intended to become the main place from which an employee uses the company’s applications and data.

So it looks like we’ll be starting from… Copilot at work, not from the Windows desktop.

Home: everything in one place

The new Copilot will consist of three parts. The first is Home, which collects the user’s recent activity: emails, Teams calls, meetings and tasks. It allows you to quickly return to interrupted work and suggests how AI can help. It also creates documents in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, which the team can immediately edit together.

Code: application from description

Code turns a verbal description into a working application, data summary or automation. It uses GitHub Copilot technology, and thanks to the Microsoft IQ mechanism, it knows the context of the user’s and the company’s work.

An application created by AI can be shared across the company as easily as a Word document.

Yes, yes, according to Microsoft’s idea, an ordinary employee will also be able to easily create their own applications.

Autopilot: an agent that takes care of things itself

The third new feature is Autopilot, previously known as Scout. It is an agent running in the cloud, with its own identity, memory and permissions.

He follows channels and threads in Teams, asks his colleagues about progress, prepares meetings, performs repetitive tasks and after a few days returns to the projects himself, without further orders.

You can invoke it by tagging it in Teams, Outlook or Documents.

Administrators in companies are supposed to control both the agents’ activities and their expenses.

First, a new Copilot for companies to test

Microsoft unveiled a new version of Copilot for businesses on September 25. Home and Code will be available to companies from the Frontier test program in the coming weeks, and to the remaining companies by the end of 2026. Autopilot enters closed tests at the end of September.

Office suite in a token package? Apparently so

A basic Microsoft 365 Copilot license still costs $30. per month per user, but the use of agents is paid additionally, in the so-called Copilot credits.

According to VentureBeat, with intensive use, the total cost can reach approximately $70. monthly.

The change in strategy is also visible in the equipment. Microsoft is quietly abandoning the Copilot+ PC brand for Windows laptops and is focusing on AI in software, where it has the strongest position.

Sources: VentureBeat, Unite.AI, TBreak, 9to5Google, Tom’s Hardware