Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork is now generally available worldwide. After three months in preview through the Frontier programme, it has already been adopted by more than half of Fortune 500 companies, and the feedback from early users has been striking.
One sales team pointed it at a stalled pipeline and got back a ranked list of at-risk opportunities, with the exact follow-up that had gone cold on each, compressing a week of manual review into a single morning. Another team used it to compare nearly four thousand files across two product versions, work that would otherwise have taken weeks.
For businesses already using Microsoft 365 Copilot, the announcement raises two questions that deserve a proper answer BEFORE anyone reaches for the ‘on’ switch. The first is whether your organisation is actually ready for what Cowork does. The second is what it will cost you. This article works through what we know.
What Cowork does
Cowork is not a smarter version of the Copilot chat you are already familiar with. It is a fundamentally different mode of working. Where standard Copilot responds to a prompt and gives you something to work with, Cowork takes a task, plans how to complete it, executes the steps involved, and returns a finished result. Microsoft describes it as an agentic system, which in plain English means it acts on your behalf rather than waiting for your next instruction at every stage.
It does this by drawing on Work IQ, Microsoft’s intelligence layer, which gives Cowork access to your emails, files, meetings, calendar, and connected business systems. The tasks it can handle range from straightforward ones like preparing a meeting brief or summarising a document, to complex multi-source work like pulling data from your CRM, cross-referencing it with emails and case history, generating a PowerPoint deck, and sending it to your team for review. All in one request.
How to access Copilot Cowork
In terms of where you access it, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app will soon include a toggle between chat and Cowork. The new interface may not be visible in your tenant straight away. Microsoft is rolling this out progressively so it may take a few days or weeks to reach you depending on which wave your tenant is in.
The Cowork home page shows you tasks in progress, lets you search and revisit previous work, and allows you to personalise your experience with skills and plugins. The app is also now available on iOS and Android within the Copilot app, so you can delegate a task from your phone and pick it up later on your desktop.
Multiple AI models – and a new one coming soon
Cowork runs on multiple AI models. In auto mode it selects the model most suited to the task: Anthropic for visual and presentation work, OpenAI for research with citations. A new model called Cowork 1 is due within the coming weeks. It has been fine-tuned specifically for Cowork tasks and is designed to run at substantially lower cost than the Frontier models, which will be significant for cost planning. GPT-5.5 is currently available only to users on the Frontier programme, not to all users at general availability.
A tip for prompting
We’ve seen a demo Microsoft has been using to showcase Cowork, which involves a single short sentence as the prompt. In practice, a vague one-liner will give you an unpredictable result. Cowork performs best when you describe the outcome you are looking for clearly. What does the finished output look like? What sources should it draw from? What decisions does it need to make? The more specific you are about the end result, the more useful the output will be – and you’ll save on wasted credits!
The Dynamics 365 integration is now generally available
Microsoft has confirmed that the Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service plugins in Cowork are now also in general availability. For businesses running these platforms, this is the most commercially significant part of the entire announcement.
Until now, Copilot existed inside Dynamics 365, helping sellers and service agents within the apps they were already using. What changes with Cowork is that those capabilities can now be combined with everything else Cowork can access. A salesperson can ask Cowork to prepare for a quarterly business review, and in a single workflow it will pull open opportunities and service cases from Dynamics 365, surface deal risks and competitive signals, propose CRM updates for approval, build a PowerPoint deck, and send it to the team by email. Each step waits for a human to approve, edit, or dismiss it before anything is actioned.
For sales teams, the out-of-the-box prompts cover account and deal preparation, deal risk signals, pipeline visibility, and progression guidance.
For customer service teams, they cover case triage, knowledge-grounded resolution drafting, escalation handoff, and supervisor visibility across the queue.
Microsoft has confirmed these prompts were tested and validated before shipping.
Cowork does not connect directly to your Dynamics 365 database. It works through governed plugins that enforce your existing identity and permission model on every call. Users can only access through Cowork what they can already access in Dynamics 365 itself. Admins control whether the plugins are enabled, and nothing is written back to your systems without a person approving it first. The Dynamics 365 ERP apps plugin is also now generally available alongside Sales and Customer Service.
How to enable Dynamics 365 Customer Service in Cowork.
How to enable Dynamics 365 Sales in Cowork.
Is your business ready for AI?
Cowork inherits your existing Microsoft 365 security controls. Sensitivity labels, communication compliance policies, audit logging, and data governance all apply. That is reassuring if those things are set up correctly. If they are not, the risks are inherited too.
Cowork indexes across your Microsoft 365 environment, including SharePoint, OneDrive, emails, and files. When a user runs a task, it searches across that index to find content relevant to the request. The critical point is that it will surface content the user already has permission to access. If the wrong people have access to the wrong files, Cowork will find those files and use them. It does not create new security gaps, but it will expose existing ones very efficiently.
A concrete example: if your company stores salary information in SharePoint without sensitivity labels restricting access, an employee asking Cowork for help preparing for a pay review conversation could inadvertently surface salary data belonging to colleagues. Most organisations have not mapped their data governance to this level of AI access.
Before enabling Cowork, it is worth carrying out an AI readiness assessment to check that your permission structures across SharePoint and OneDrive are appropriate, that sensitivity labels are applied to confidential data, that audit logging is enabled, and that your team understands what Cowork can access. Cowork is off by default, meaning an administrator has to enable it deliberately. That is a sensible moment to pause and check the foundations are in place first.
For more information about booking an AI readiness assessment, contact our team on 01782 916920.
How much are Cowork credits and what will it cost your business?
Your Microsoft 365 Copilot licence gives you access to Cowork, but it doesn’t give you any included usage. Every task Cowork runs is billed separately on a usage basis, measured in Copilot Credits. Microsoft has confirmed two payment options: pay-as-you-go, where you are billed at the end of each month based on what you have used, and the P3 pre-purchase plan, where you commit to a volume of credits upfront in exchange for a discount.
You can see full Copilot Studio pricing here.
What about the 25,000 Copilot Credit pack?
A third option, Copilot Credit packs providing 25,000 credits per month, also exists within the broader Copilot Credits system. Microsoft has confirmed there is no capability difference (see the FAQ) between a credit pack and pay-as-you-go billing, but its Cowork documentation currently refers to ‘existing capacity’ rather than explicitly naming this option, which has led to some confusion. However, we now understand from Microsoft that this option is also available for consuming Copilot Credits.
Let’s look at a Cowork pricing example
The price per credit on pay-as-you-go is $0.01. What determines your total spend is how many credits each task uses, and that depends on four things: which AI model is used, how much context is retrieved from your data, how many tool actions are taken, and how long the task runs. A light task, such as a short written summary, might use between 70 and 200 credits. A medium task drawing on multiple sources and producing structured outputs might use 400 to 600. A heavy task involving deep reasoning across many sources could use 1,500 or more.
Generating a presentation sits somewhere in the range of 600 to 1,500 credits depending on complexity, which at the published rate works out at roughly £5 to £12 per task.
Those per-task figures sound modest, but costs scale with usage.
To give a concrete illustration, we ran Microsoft’s own Cowork cost estimator using a typical structure for a 25-person SME: 6 corporate knowledge workers, 10 customer-facing staff, 5 technical workers, and 4 managers and senior leaders. The estimator returned a projected monthly credit usage of 378,650 credits, a monthly cost of approximately $3,787, and an average of around $151 per user per month. So that’s in the region of £3,000 per month for the business as a whole.
These figures are estimates based on Microsoft’s own modelling and will vary depending on how frequently the tool is used and how complex the tasks are, but they give a meaningful sense of what to expect at scale.
Be wary of overconsumption
Earlier in 2026, Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget by April after rolling out Anthropic’s Claude Code to its engineering organisation. Adoption spread faster than the finance team’s models had anticipated, individual usage varied wildly, and there were no effective spending controls in place until the damage was done.
Microsoft has taken note of this dynamic, which has been seen across many large AI adopters, and has built a Cost Management dashboard into the Microsoft 365 admin centre specifically in response to it. Admins can set spending limits at the tenant, group, and user level, configure alerts at whatever threshold is appropriate, and apply hard caps that stop usage once a budget is reached. User-level pricing visibility, so that individuals can see what each task costs as they run it, is confirmed as coming soon after general availability.
Model choice also affects cost in a way that is not immediately obvious. The most capable models consume more credits per task. Cowork 1, the new model arriving in the coming weeks, is specifically designed to handle everyday tasks at substantially lower cost. Microsoft’s own testing found that Copilot Cowork was 30 to 40% cheaper per prompt than Claude Cowork when using the same Opus 4.8 model, though this comparison was conducted internally by Microsoft rather than by an independent party.
Choosing the right model for the task is important and auto mode is designed to make sensible choices on your behalf, unless you prefer to select manually.
What about billing for Frontier users?
If your organisation used Cowork during the Frontier preview period between March 30 and June 16, you are not being charged for that usage. Microsoft has confirmed a grace period, and billing for Frontier users does not begin until July 1, 2026. After that date, standard usage-based billing applies.
The important thing to understand is that billing does not activate automatically on July 1. To use Cowork with billing enabled, an administrator needs to set up usage-based billing in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and connect the organisation to an Azure subscription or to Copilot Credits. If that setup is not completed, Cowork will likely stop working rather than start generating unexpected charges.
What to do BEFORE you enable it
Cowork is genuinely capable, and for businesses using Dynamics 365 in particular, the potential to compress hours of manual preparation into a single structured workflow is real.
- Take an AI readiness assessment before enabling Cowork.
- Use Microsoft's cost estimator to model your expected usage before you turn billing on.
- Set up the Cost Management dashboard with spending limits and alerts.
- Think carefully about which users need access and what kind of tasks they will be running.
- Keep an eye on the model selection: once Cowork 1 is available, it will likely be the sensible default for most routine tasks.
The businesses that will get the most from Cowork are the ones that treat the governance and cost planning as part of the deployment, not an afterthought.