Microsoft's Copilot Cowork now generally available with usage-based billing

Copilot Cowork is an agentic AI experience capable of running complex, multi-tool tasks from start to finish for Microsoft 365 customers.

Back in March, Microsoft first revealed Copilot Cowork, a new agentic AI experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot through which users can assign tasks to AI to complete in the background. After testing the service with a limited set of customers in Research Preview for a few weeks, Microsoft announced the general availability of Copilot Cowork to customers in the Frontier program on March 30.

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Copilot Cowork worldwide for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers. The company also highlighted that Cowork became the fastest-growing feature in the history of its Frontier program.

Unlike regular Copilot Chat, Copilot Cowork can run complex, long-running, multi-tool tasks from start to finish in the cloud by using organizational context through Work IQ. When compared to Claude Cowork, Microsoft claims that Copilot Cowork will be 30% to 40% cheaper on average with its Microsoft 365 connector.

For now, Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic models, including Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6. However, Frontier customers can now use GPT-5.5. Microsoft also announced Cowork 1, a secure fine-tuned model coming in the next few weeks, which is designed to handle everyday Copilot tasks at a lower cost.

To access Copilot Cowork, a Microsoft 365 Copilot user subscription is required. Usage is billed separately through Copilot Credits, based on model use, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime. Pay-as-you-go pricing is set at $0.01 per Copilot Credit. To offer IT teams full control over usage costs, Microsoft provides spending limits, usage alerts, user-level controls, reporting, and prepaid usage plans for organizations. Usage-based billing begins today. However, Frontier customers who used Cowork between March 30 and June 16 will not be billed until July 1, 2026.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app now includes a toggle to enter the full Cowork experience. Microsoft is also adding partner plugins, with Enosix, Harvey, LSEG, Miro, monday.com, Moody’s, Morningstar, S&P Global Energy, and TeamsMaestro available now. Adobe, Atlassian, Box, Canva, Databricks, and others are coming soon.