Microsoft officially unveiled its redesigned Copilot app on Sept. 25, 2026, a "super app" that consolidates three artificial intelligence functions into one interface. The new Copilot combines chat, coding and agents, affecting both the knowledge workers Microsoft targets and the IT administrators who will manage the tool. The launch also renames Scout, the AI personal assistant Microsoft introduced at Build earlier this year, as Autopilot.
The app is organized into three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot. Home merges Copilot Chat and Cowork and serves as the default landing screen, with Microsoft planning to add a Today feature that acts as a personalized dashboard for important emails, meeting requests and Teams threads. Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer of AI at work, said Home is where users get their bearings, review recent activity, receive suggestions on what Copilot can help with and resume work where they left off.
The Code tab lets anyone build an app, tracker, dashboard or automation and share the results with colleagues as cloud-hosted internal apps. Spataro said Code runs in a sandboxed environment powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot and can be hosted securely within a customer's tenant. Autopilot, which Spataro described as a digital teammate, is the cloud equivalent of the previously desktop-only Scout and lets a personal AI assistant keep working while a user sleeps. It has its own cloud computer instance that can watch Teams channels, run recurring work tasks or handle follow-ups.
Microsoft has positioned Autopilot as enterprise grade for businesses that rely on its Office and identity management suites. Spataro said Autopilot lives in a customer's tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, is built on Microsoft IQ so it understands how an organization works, and appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents, where it can be mentioned like a colleague with permissions, audit and governance behind it.
Pricing now depends on what employees do. Microsoft is using usage-based billing for the Cowork, Code and Autopilot parts of the app, so long-running agentic capabilities or use of models such as Astra and Fable are billed by usage. The regular user subscription license covers Copilot in Chat and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. An auto model picker matches models to tasks, and IT admins will need Microsoft's new FinOps for AI to manage AI spend.
Microsoft is comparing the new Copilot to Office's influence on productivity. Spataro said that just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era. CEO Satya Nadella called Copilot a new operating system, saying in a post on X that Microsoft is building it as a new OS for work spanning every model, every form factor and every task. Microsoft is now calling Copilot "the AI built for work."
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