On 25 September 2026, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer for AI at Work, announced on the official Microsoft Blog that the Copilot app now carries three new capabilities—Home, Code and Autopilot—bringing everyday conversation, delegated long-running work, natural-language solution building, and a personal agent that keeps working when the user is away into one workplace entry point. The same post sets out rollout timing, FinOps billing splits, and a forward look at Today, @Copilot in Teams and Ignite.
Home: Chat and Cowork together, with Office inside Copilot
Home is framed as the new starting point in Copilot. Spataro writes that work moves constantly among meetings, chats, documents, email, apps and agents; Home is where people get their bearings, review recent activity, take suggestions and pick up where they left off.
- Chat is instant and conversational—quick questions, lookups, drafts and staying in the loop.
- Cowork is for work you delegate end-to-end—an RFP response, a launch kit, a customer briefing, a financial close package—returning a completed result worth iterating on.
- Coming soon, users will not need to pick a mode: state the goal, and Copilot routes to Chat, Cowork or Code.
Office in Copilot brings the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint into Copilot: from Home, ask Copilot to draft a launch brief, model a budget, build a deck or pick up a file the team is already working on, and it creates or updates a real, editable document, workbook or presentation that stays in sync with the Office apps. Spataro also notes PowerPoint keeping decks on-brand, Excel showing what changed and why plus chart recommendations, and Skills across Microsoft 365 (for example financial skills in Excel and legal skills in Word) with reusable, role-specific workflows.
Code: build solutions in natural language, sandboxed with Managed Runtime
Code moves solution-building beyond developers alone. Describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in natural language, and Copilot chooses an approach and builds it—from persistent desktop widgets and interactive dashboards to cloud-hosted internal apps shared with a team.
Microsoft states that Code is powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot; it runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely in the tenant. With Microsoft IQ, creations are grounded in work context; plugins sync automatically. Software developers continue to use GitHub Copilot day to day, with more connectivity into the Copilot platform.
On timing, the post’s introduction says Home and Code start rolling out in the Frontier program in the coming weeks; the Code section separately says Code is rolling out to Frontier at the end of the month, with broad availability in the coming weeks, and will be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year. Both phrasings should be kept distinct rather than collapsed into one date.
Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime—hosting infrastructure that lets code run safely inside the company’s Microsoft 365 environment—is governed by IT yet easy for others to share, connect to live data and access from anywhere. The same foundation supports apps built in Cowork, Code and Copilot Studio, and is opening to third-party and pro-code developers. Managed Runtime is now in preview and will also be accessible inside Code.
Autopilot: the persistent agent formerly called Scout
Autopilot, previously called Scout, is described as a digital teammate: give it a name, a role and a goal, and it goes to work—watching channels, following up on threads, running recurring work and picking a project back up days later without waiting for a prompt. One example is setting up and managing a full supplier review process—schedule and workback plan, then prep, meetings and follow-ups, including reaching out to stakeholders. It is cloud-hosted, so it keeps working while the user sleeps or attention is elsewhere.
Autopilot lives in the tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, built on Microsoft IQ. It shows up where people already work—Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents—so it can be @mentioned like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance behind it. Users set objectives and boundaries; Autopilot handles the rest while keeping them informed and in control. Autopilot is expanding to private preview at the end of the month.
Business context, FinOps and what’s next
Spataro also outlines expanded business context: Fabric IQ brings trusted data including Power BI semantic models into Copilot (generally available in Chat and Cowork today, with Code integration coming through Frontier soon); over the next month in public preview, Copilot will be grounded in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data and workflows; a new plugin registry will unify Microsoft, partner and custom plugins for central IT approval.
On FinOps for AI, Microsoft distinguishes two spend models:
- A user subscription license (USL) for everyday AI—Copilot in Chat and across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, model selection and new capabilities—with Auto routing each request by accuracy, speed and cost.
- Usage-based billing (UBB) for agentic work and frontier models—Cowork, Code and Autopilot, plus frontier models such as Astra and Fable, run on UBB.
Cost management in Agent 365 is expanding to Code and Copilot Managed Runtime, with support for agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio planned for October. End users can view credit usage, remaining balances and history directly in Copilot.
Looking ahead, Today in Home—a proactive command center across mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks—enters private preview in October, and is also coming to Outlook and Teams. @Copilot in Teams (shared channel, group-chat or meeting context and permissions) will be in private preview by the end of the month. More is expected at Microsoft Ignite, 17–20 November 2026, in San Francisco and online.
For readers watching workplace AI, the announcement’s centre of gravity is structure and cadence: three checkable product surfaces for ask, delegate, build and persist—with Frontier, private preview, USL and UBB marking what is still gated—rather than a claim that existing workflows are already fully replaced.
Primary sources
- Microsoft Official Blog: Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot (25 Sep 2026, Jared Spataro)
- Microsoft Source EMEA summary: https://news.microsoft.com/source/emea/2026/09/new-microsoft-copilot-brings-home-code-and-autopilot-together/
