What happened
Microsoft said on June 16 that Copilot Cowork is now generally available in Microsoft 365. Cowork executes long-running, multi-step workflows across documents, apps and organizational data, acting as an AI coworker that carries out extended business processes rather than answering single prompts. GA follows a Frontier preview that Microsoft says was used across more than half of the Fortune 500.
The feature is off by default, and administrators can set spending limits through consumption-based Copilot Credits. At launch it runs on Anthropic models, specifically Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, with GPT-5.5 available through Frontier. Microsoft said Frontier-preview tenants were not billed until July 1 as a grace period.
Why it matters
Moving from prompt-and-response to delegated, multi-step processes is a meaningful shift in how work software behaves. Consumption billing and admin spend controls acknowledge that long-running agent work has real and variable cost.
For organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365, this brings agentic automation into tools employees already use every day.
MintedBrain take
Consumption-based pricing means costs can climb quietly as usage grows, so set spending limits before broad rollout and monitor them. Start with well-scoped, reviewable processes rather than handing over open-ended work, and confirm the model choice fits your data-handling requirements.
Discussion
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