"Over the last year, we have been pushing Copilot toward taking action. That means completing tasks, running workflows, and doing work on your behalf, and Copilot Cowork is designed for that," said the company.

Copilot Cowork is designed to help users delegate tasks across Microsoft 365 apps and automate parts of their daily workflow. The idea behind Cowork is simple: users describe the outcome they want, and the system turns that request into a plan. It then works across tools such as Outlook, Teams, Excel and other Microsoft 365 apps to gather the required information from emails, meetings, files and messages. The feature runs on Microsoft's Work IQ system, which analyses signals across a user's work environment to understand context before carrying out tasks.

Once a task is assigned, Cowork creates a step-by-step plan and continues executing it in the background. Users can track progress through checkpoints, make adjustments or pause execution at any time. If the system requires clarification, it will ask for input before proceeding. Any suggested changes or actions are also shown to the user for approval before they are applied.

Microsoft says Cowork is designed to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, allowing users to keep several workflows running in the background while focusing on other work.

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The company further shared several examples of how the feature might be used in everyday work scenarios. For instance, Cowork can help reorganise a user's calendar by analysing Outlook schedules, identifying conflicts or low-priority meetings and suggesting changes. Once approved, it can reschedule meetings, decline invites or add focus time blocks automatically.

Then, it can also assist with meeting preparation. In one example, Cowork collects relevant emails, documents and meeting notes, schedules preparation time and then also generates materials such as briefing documents, analysis and presentation decks. These files are then saved in Microsoft 365 so teams can continue working on them collaboratively.

Another scenario shared by Microsoft involves research tasks, where Copilot Cowork can collect information from sources such as financial filings, analyst reports and news articles, then organise the data into an executive summary, a detailed research memo and supporting spreadsheets.

For product launches or other cross-team projects, the system can also help assemble materials such as competitive analysis spreadsheets, Messaging documents and presentation decks while outlining timelines and next steps.

Microsoft says Cowork operates within the existing security and compliance framework of Microsoft 365. Permissions, identity controls and auditing remain in place, and the system runs tasks in a sandboxed cloud environment.

The feature is currently being tested with a limited number of customers as part of a research preview. Microsoft plans to expand availability through its Frontier program starting in late March 2026.