As we covered back in March, Cowork is one of the latest enhancements to Copilot and Microsoft have now announced its first set of improvements.
Copilot Cowork combines Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude technologies to turn a simple chat prompt into actionable plans, using data across systems to automate tasks and workflows. Cowork is already grounded in your everyday Microsoft data – emails, meetings, documents etc, but with today’s announcement, the scope and ease of access have been extended further.
Copilot Cowork on iOS and Android
As Copilot Cowork is already cloud-based, it makes sense for it to be made available on mobile devices and Microsoft have done just that. Users of iOS and Android devices can initiate a new set of tasks from anywhere and Cowork can be working on it immediately, rather than having to wait to be back at the office.
Cowork Skills
Although Cowork already comes with a powerful skill set that allows users to create documents, send messages, conduct research etc., new repeatable skills can also be created and utilised in future chat requests. As an example, this video illustrates how easy it is to create a skill that mimics the user’s email style as a reusable skill for future emails:
Cowork Plugins
Although the various Copilot Agents make it easy to interrogate data from a single source, Cowork Plugins help to bring these sources together, so that a single Copilot query can work with all your data sources at once. Microsoft have released connector plugins for Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, along with Fabric IQ and ERP applications and will shortly be releasing plugins for:
- LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group)
- Miro
- monday.com
- S&P Global Energy
with more on the horizon. For organisations with more bespoke requirements, it is also possible to develop your own plugins and bring them into Cowork; for more details on how to create these, click here.
How to access Copilot Cowork
Copilot Cowork is currently limited to organisations enrolled in the Frontier program, Microsoft’s initiative to introduce their more experimental AI features to users. The good news is that there is no cost to signing up to Frontier, except for existing Copilot licence costs. Click here to find out more on how to enable Frontier for your organisation.
References:
- Copilot Cowork: From conversation to action across skills, integrations, and devices
- Your people are ready. But your systems are the bottleneck.
Summary
With Copilot Cowork, Microsoft look to be bringing all the separate pieces of AI together into a single joined-up approach, which should give users a central place to harness the power of Copilot and Claude to carry out an array of tasks all at once. It will be interesting to see how users will take to Cowork and how much time it will save them, especially when further plugins are released. If you are an existing Strategy 365 client and wish to discuss Copilot Cowork or how to enrol your organisation into the Frontier program, get in touch with one of our experts who will be happy to help.