Microsoft meters agentic Copilot work by usage

Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer for AI at work, described three new Copilot capabilities in the September 25 official blog: Home, Code, and Autopilot. Home and Code will start rolling out in the Frontier program in the coming weeks. Autopilot is expanding to private preview at the end of the month. Later in the same post, Microsoft says Code is rolling out to Frontier at the end of the month, with broader availability in the following weeks, and that Code will be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.

Home puts Chat and Cowork in one place and brings Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into Copilot. Chat is for immediate questions, lookups, and drafts. Cowork is for work the user delegates and gets back finished. The examples in the post are an RFP response, a launch kit, a customer briefing, and a financial close package. From Home, a person can ask Copilot to draft a launch brief, model a budget, or continue a file the team already uses. The result is an editable document, workbook, or presentation. Teammates can be @mentioned, and edits stay in sync between Copilot and the Office apps. The post says that later, users will not have to pick a mode first: Copilot will route work to Chat, Cowork, or Code. It does not date that change.

Code takes a natural-language description of an app, tracker, dashboard, automation, or workflow, chooses an approach, and builds it. It uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandbox, and can be hosted in the customer's tenant. Microsoft IQ supplies work context, and plugins sync automatically. Software developers keep using GitHub Copilot for day-to-day work, with more connectivity into the Copilot platform.

Copilot Managed Runtime is hosting inside the company's Microsoft 365 environment, governed by IT. The blog says it is in preview now, will be available inside Code, and supports apps from Cowork, Code, Copilot Studio, and third-party or pro-code developers.

Autopilot was previously called Scout. After a user gives it a name, a role, and a goal, it can watch channels, follow threads, run recurring work, and pick a project up days later without waiting for a new prompt. The example in the post is setting up and running a supplier review: schedule, preparation, meetings, and follow-ups. It is cloud-hosted and has its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, built on Microsoft IQ. It appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels, and documents. People @mention it, with permissions, audit, and governance still in place. The user sets the objective and the boundaries.

Billing is split. A user subscription license covers everyday use: Chat, Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, and model selection. Auto, inside that license, weighs accuracy, speed, and cost on each request. Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new long-running agent capabilities, and frontier models such as Astra and Fable run on usage-based billing.

Fabric IQ brings more than 20 million Power BI semantic models into Copilot. The blog says it is generally available in Chat and Cowork today, with Code integration coming through Frontier. Over the next month, in public preview, Copilot will also be grounded in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data and workflows. A plugin registry is rolling out and is planned to be generally available across surfaces in the coming weeks. IT approves plugins centrally; developers and partners publish once.

None of the three capabilities is described as generally available to every customer. Home and Code go through Frontier first. Autopilot starts as a private preview. Cost management in Agent 365 is expanding beyond Cowork and the Work IQ APIs to Code and Managed Runtime. Support for agents built in Copilot Studio is planned for October. Admins can set spending policies through an API, route credit requests into existing approval flows, and choose which model families each group may use. Those settings also limit what Auto can select. End users can see credit usage, remaining balance, and history in Copilot.

The post also previews Today, and a private preview of @Copilot in Teams. This article does not treat those previews as features people can use now. The announcement does not list a unit price for usage-based billing.