Microsoft introduced a rebuilt Copilot on 25th September 2026, with three new capabilities: Home, Code and Autopilot, an agent that works without waiting for a prompt. The company also moved long-running agent work onto usage-based billing, apart from the flat license that covers chat.
What’s New?
- Microsoft split the new Copilot into Home, Code and Autopilot, with Home putting Chat and Cowork on a single starting screen.
- Code lets staff outside engineering describe an app, tracker or dashboard in plain language and have Copilot build it.
- Autopilot, the agent Microsoft previously called Scout, enters private preview at the end of the month with its own identity and memory.
- Cowork, Code and Autopilot all bill by usage. Chat and Copilot inside the Office apps stay on a fixed per-user license.
- Fabric IQ now grounds Copilot in data from more than 20 million semantic models in Power BI.
Code and Autopilot push Copilot past the chat box
Home is the new front door. Microsoft said in its launch announcement that Home pairs Chat, built for quick questions, with Cowork. Cowork takes a defined task and returns a finished result, such as an RFP response or a financial close package. Office in Copilot builds Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the same screen, so a request yields a real file teammates can edit live.
Code is the bigger bet. Microsoft calls small, purpose-built apps a fourth unit of knowledge work, next to the document, the spreadsheet and the deck. “Learning to build them is becoming as basic a skill as writing a memo or modeling a budget,” the company wrote.
We’re building Copilot as a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task. Today, we’re announcing our biggest update to Copilot to date, bringing four things together:
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) September 25, 2026
· Autopilot: proactive and long-running agent built for the enterprise
· Code:… pic.twitter.com/W2ClHHkCK3
Code runs in a sandbox, can be hosted inside a customer’s tenant and shares its underlying technology with GitHub Copilot. Microsoft said its software developers keep using GitHub Copilot, the same tool it picked over Claude Code for its own staff. Underneath sits Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, now in preview, which hosts that code inside a company’s Microsoft 365 environment under IT control.
Autopilot takes a name, a role and a goal from its owner. It then watches channels, chases threads and resumes projects days later on its own. The agent lives in the tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, and colleagues can @mention it in Teams or Outlook.
The agentic tier runs on the meter
Pricing carries the sharpest change for IT budgets. A user subscription license (USL) covers Chat plus Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, along with model selection across providers. Usage-based billing (UBB) covers Cowork, Code, Autopilot and frontier models such as Astra and Fable.
“Agentic work requires a different type of spend, one that gives you the best quality possible with the most advanced models,” Microsoft said.
The flat license now buys the assistant, and the agents doing delegated work draw on credits. Autopilot keeps working in the cloud while its owner sleeps, which makes it the feature most likely to surprise a finance team.
Microsoft shipped FinOps for AI controls alongside the launch. Cost management in Agent 365 extends to Code and Copilot Managed Runtime, with Copilot Studio agents planned for October. The controls include:
- Spending policies that admins can manage at scale through an API
- Credit requests from users routed into existing approval workflows
- Model-family limits per user group, which also cap the models Auto can pick
- Credit balances and usage history that users can see inside Copilot
What’s Next?
The post leaves two questions open. What does a credit cost, and how many will an always-on Autopilot agent consume in a normal week? Microsoft points to a separate pricing explainer instead of listing rates. Admins in Frontier tenants can set model-family limits and spending policies before Code reaches their users.
The rollout calendar is short. Code lands in the Frontier program at the end of the month, when Autopilot and @Copilot in Teams also enter private preview. Today, a proactive command center across mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks, follows in private preview in October.
