Microsoft unveils Copilot 'super app' and likens it to Office

Microsoft has officially unveiled its overhauled Copilot — the app it had already dubbed a "super app." A single interface now brings together three capabilities: chat, app-building and agents. At the same time, Scout, the assistant shown at Build earlier this year, is being renamed Autopilot.

Three tabs

The app is built around three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot. Home merges Copilot Chat and Cowork and becomes the default landing experience; a Today feature is planned to serve as a personalized dashboard for important emails, meeting requests, Teams threads and more. According to Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work, Home is where you "get your bearings": review recent activity, get suggestions and pick up where you left off.

The Code tab is the surprise for an app aimed at knowledge workers. It lets anyone create an app, tracker, dashboard or automation and share the result with colleagues as an internal cloud-hosted app. Code runs on the same technology as GitHub Copilot, in a sandboxed environment, and can be hosted securely within a company's tenant.

A 'digital teammate'

Spataro describes Autopilot as a "digital teammate." It is the cloud version of the former Scout: the assistant gets its own cloud computer instance that can watch Teams channels, run recurring tasks and handle follow-ups even while you sleep. What sets it apart from other agents is enterprise readiness: Autopilot lives in the organization's tenant with its own identity, memory and workspace, is built on Microsoft IQ, and shows up right inside Teams, Outlook and documents, where you can @mention it like a colleague — with permissions, audit and governance behind it.

Usage-based billing

The pricing model changes: the Cowork, Code and Autopilot parts are billed by actual usage, including use of models like Astra and Fable. A regular license gives you Copilot in chat and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. To keep AI spend from spiraling, IT admins get a new tool called FinOps for AI.

Satya Nadella calls Copilot a new "operating system for work," while Spataro draws a direct parallel: just as Office defined work in the PC era, the new Copilot is meant to define it in the AI era. The Verge notes the ambition is high, but the competition is far fiercer today: Copilot trails Claude and ChatGPT in the consumer space, and Microsoft has fallen behind Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. Home and Code will begin rolling out to the Frontier early-access program in the coming weeks, and Autopilot enters private preview by month's end.

Source: The Verge