Copilot Cowork is the part of Microsoft 365 Copilot where you hand over a whole job instead of chatting about it. You describe the outcome, Cowork plans the steps, works across your email, calendar, Teams meetings and files, and comes back when it’s finished or needs your approval. To start, open Cowork at copilot.cloud.microsoft or in the Copilot app, type the job in plain language, and approve the actions it asks about.
There’s no setup in between. Agent tools outside Microsoft 365 usually need your mailbox, calendar and file storage connected first, and Cowork already works with all of it within your existing permissions. In this tutorial I handed it seven jobs in about 20 minutes and let them run side by side.
What do you need before you start?
- A Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, with Cowork turned on by your admin. Cowork has been generally available for work and school accounts since 16 June 2026. It was in the Frontier preview when I recorded this.
- Usage-based billing. Your Copilot licence doesn’t include a Cowork usage allowance. Every run spends Copilot Credits, charged at US$0.01 each on pay-as-you-go, and admins can set limits for each user or group. Type
/costin a task after it finishes to see what it used. - Somewhere to run it. The browser at copilot.cloud.microsoft, or the Microsoft Copilot desktop app for Windows and macOS.
- Your files in OneDrive or SharePoint. Cowork can’t reach files stored locally on your device, read encrypted files, or delete anything in OneDrive or SharePoint.
How do you hand Cowork your first job?
- Open Cowork. Pick a suggested prompt such as Catch me up or Prep for a meeting, or click into the chat box.
- Describe the whole job, output included. My first one was: look at my calendar for next week, list my internal and external meetings, flag the high-priority ones I need to prepare for, and find three or four one-hour slots for focus time.
- Point it at the right content. Choose Add attachments, then Add work context to bring in files, people, emails, and Teams chats or meetings. In my demo, typing / and the start of a name found a sales CSV sitting in a SharePoint site, and later a Teams meeting, with nothing uploaded.
- Check the model, or leave it on Auto. The model picker defaults to Auto and the effort setting to Medium. The model you choose changes what a job costs, which I tested in what each Copilot Cowork model costs.
- Send it, then start the next job. Cowork keeps working when you leave the task. The Recent list shows each one as In progress, Needs input, Done or Failed.
- Approve what it asks. Before sending an email, posting in Teams or creating an event, Cowork shows a preview and an action button such as Send or Create, which allows that action once. More options stops it asking for similar actions in the session, and for email and Teams you can limit that to one recipient or a domain.
- Keep going in the same task. Follow-ups carry the context. When Cowork suggested four focus slots, I replied “insert those focus slots”, approved the calendar action, and four Focus time blocks appeared in my calendar.
- Schedule anything you’ll want again. Put the timing in the prompt. Mine said: at 7am Monday to Friday, summarise my calendar for the day, flag any emails from the previous day I may have missed, and send it to me as an HTML email without approval. Cowork drafted the schedule, asked whether each run should open in a new session, and I chose Activate and run now. Scheduled prompts live on the Automations page, where you can run, pause, edit or delete them.
What can you delegate to Cowork on day one?
None of these needed a connector.
| Job | What I asked for | What came back |
|---|---|---|
| Plan the week | Priority meetings and focus time | Meetings flagged, four slots booked |
| Sales report | Multi-sheet workbook from a 2025 sales CSV | Sheets and charts by product, region and channel |
| Briefing | Calendar, email and 48 to 72 hours of snack industry news | Briefing email plus an HTML version |
| Meeting follow-up | Summary, key points, actions with owners and dates | Summary, action table and an email to every attendee |
| Email reply | Reply to a new client brief, sent straight away | Sent, because I told it not to draft first |
| Dashboard | The sales workbook as an interactive HTML dashboard | Tabbed dashboard: overview, trends, channels, regions, products |
| Morning briefing | The 7am weekday email above | Scheduled and run once on the spot |
For the meeting follow-up I pointed Cowork at a transcribed Teams meeting and it brought in its built-in Meetings skill automatically, with no bot to invite and no transcript to download. In a separate session I gave it our meeting minutes template as well, and the Word document followed its headings exactly, with the draft email in my Drafts folder and the document attached.
The dashboard job iterated on the sales workbook Cowork had already built. For dashboards from raw exports, see how to build a dashboard with Copilot Cowork.
Hand over whole jobs, and loosen approvals on purpose
Cowork earns its keep on jobs with several steps around them. Ask for the minutes, the action items, the email to attendees and the attachment in one go, and don’t sit and watch it run: I had the calendar, the sales report, the briefing and the meeting follow-up going together and checked back when the notifications came in. Give it your templates too. A minutes template, a report layout or a design file gets you your organisation’s format back instead of Cowork’s default.
Approvals are the setting I’d be most deliberate about. In my demo the reply and the morning briefing skipped the draft step because I asked them to, and the briefing only ever goes to me. For anything going to customers I’d keep the approval prompt until you’ve seen a few runs. You can review and revoke the “don’t ask again” choices in the Permissions section of the side panel.
Then look at what it’s reading. Cowork only sees what you can see, and it works from the files as they are, so a SharePoint full of duplicates and old versions feeds straight into your reports and briefings. Why SharePoint needs an information architecture before AI covers where to start.
The same habits carry into bigger work. I used Cowork to compare a documented process with how the work really runs and to build a CRM app on SharePoint lists.
How is Cowork different from Copilot Chat and editing in Word?
Copilot Chat answers you in the conversation, and editing with Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint changes the open document as you watch. Cowork takes a job across several apps, runs it in the background and can repeat it on a schedule. Microsoft 365 Copilot vs Copilot Chat sorts out which one your licence includes.
What to watch for
A job waiting for an approval stops until you come back, so check the Recent list for anything marked Needs input. One of my calendar tasks sat at the create event step until I approved it.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to set up connectors for Copilot Cowork? Not for Microsoft 365 work. Email, scheduling, calendar management, meetings, daily briefings, enterprise search and the Office apps are built-in skills. For other systems, you can add plugins from the Microsoft 365 App Store with Browse plugins.
Can I use Copilot Cowork on my phone? Yes, in the Microsoft Copilot mobile app for iPhone and Android. A job started on your phone keeps running, and you can pick it up on your laptop. Plugins you’ve set up on the desktop are available on mobile too.
Can Cowork react to emails instead of running on a schedule? Yes. Event-driven tasks run when a matching email, a Teams message or an @mention arrives. Cowork shows a Set up trigger? card for you to review first, and by default these tasks prepare actions for your approval rather than acting on their own.
Can I give Cowork standing instructions? Yes. Custom instructions go on the Preferences tab under Customize, up to 20 KB. For repeatable jobs you can also write custom skills as SKILL.md files, each in its own subfolder of Documents/Cowork/skills, up to 50 of them, which Cowork picks up at the start of each session.
