Microsoft rebuilds Copilot around Home, Code and Autopilot, and puts the agents on metered billing

Microsoft on Friday announced what it calls "the new Copilot": a reorganized Copilot app built around three capabilities — Home, Code and Autopilot — plus a hosting layer for the software those tools produce and a clearer split in how the work gets billed. The announcement on the Official Microsoft Blog is mostly a rollout plan rather than a launch: most pieces arrive through Microsoft's Frontier early-access program or in private preview over the coming weeks.

The part with the most practical consequence for organizations is not any single feature. It is the line Microsoft draws between everyday assistance, covered by a per-user license, and long-running agentic work, which runs on usage-based billing.

Three modes in one app

Home becomes the starting point of the app, combining the existing Chat (quick, conversational requests) and Cowork (delegated tasks that run end-to-end and return a finished result, such as an RFP response or a financial close package). It also brings Office in Copilot: Copilot creates or updates real, editable Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint decks, which stay in sync with the Office apps and can be edited live by teammates. Microsoft says that "coming soon" users will no longer pick a mode; Copilot will route each request to Chat, Cowork or Code on its own.

Code lets non-developers describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in natural language and have Copilot build it — from desktop widgets to cloud-hosted internal apps shared with a team. Microsoft says it is powered by "the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot", runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted within the customer's tenant. Professional developers are expected to keep using GitHub Copilot.

Autopilot, previously called Scout, is a persistent agent that works without waiting for a prompt. Users give it a name, a role and a goal; it watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and can resume a project days later. Microsoft describes it as cloud-hosted and living in the tenant "with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace", reachable by @mention in Teams, Outlook, chats and documents, with permissions, audit and governance applied.

Where the code runs

Alongside Code, Microsoft introduced Copilot Managed Runtime, now in preview: hosting infrastructure that runs these user-built apps inside the company's Microsoft 365 environment, governed by IT. The blog says the same foundation underpins apps built in Cowork, Code and Copilot Studio, and that Microsoft is opening it to third-party and pro-code developers.

That matters because the obvious risk of letting every employee generate software is a sprawl of unmanaged apps holding company data. Microsoft's answer is to keep them inside the tenant boundary, where existing identity and compliance controls apply. How well that works in practice will only become clear once customers get past preview.

More business context, one plugin catalog

• Fabric IQ, which brings context from Power BI's more than 20 million semantic models into Copilot, is generally available in Chat and Cowork as of today, with Code integration coming later through Frontier.
• Grounding in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data and workflows rolls out in public preview over the next month.
• A new plugin registry puts Microsoft, partner and custom plugins in one catalog that IT approves and manages centrally. It is rolling out now, with general availability across surfaces in the coming weeks.

The billing split

Microsoft frames pricing in two tiers. The user subscription license (USL) covers everyday work — Copilot in Chat and across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus model selection — with Auto, which weighs accuracy, speed and cost per request to pick a model, at its core. Usage-based billing (UBB) covers agentic work: the blog states that Cowork, Code, Autopilot, other long-running agentic capabilities, and frontier models "like Astra and Fable" all run on UBB.

Microsoft's cost-management documentation, last updated earlier this month, lists the services currently governed through usage-based billing in the Microsoft 365 admin center as Cowork, apps built with Cowork, and the Work IQ API, all measured in Copilot Credits. It also notes that spending policies have an Auto-apply new services setting that is enabled by default, so policies can automatically extend to future supported services. With Code and Autopilot now placed on UBB, administrators should check which of their policies inherit new services before these tools reach their users.

Microsoft also announced FinOps controls: cost management in Agent 365 expands to Code and Copilot Managed Runtime, with Copilot Studio agents planned for October. Admins can set spending policies via API, route credit requests into approval workflows, and restrict which model families different groups can use — a setting that also limits which models Auto can choose. End users will see their credit usage and remaining balance inside Copilot.

Timeline, with a caveat

The dates in the announcement are not fully consistent. The introduction says Home and Code will start rolling out to Frontier "in the coming weeks", while the Code section says Code reaches Frontier "at the end of the month", with broad availability in the coming weeks and a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year. Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. Two further features were previewed: Today, a proactive daily view across mail, calendar, Teams and tasks, enters private preview in October, and a shared-context @Copilot in Teams reaches private preview by the end of the month.

What to watch

None of this is broadly available yet, and Microsoft published no per-task prices for Code or Autopilot in the announcement itself. The open questions are practical: how many Copilot Credits a persistent agent like Autopilot consumes when it works around the clock, how IT will audit apps generated by non-developers, and whether automatic routing between Chat, Cowork and Code will make it harder for users to predict when a request moves from the flat-rate license onto metered billing.