By Nicole Dezen, Chief Partner Officer and CVP, Global Channel Partner Sales
AI at Work is entering a new phase as customers look beyond individual productivity gains to AI that can take on complex work, build solutions, and automate business processes. The next evolution of Frontier Transformation is about matching the right mode of intelligence to the task at hand.
Today, Microsoft is advancing that vision with the new Copilot, an evolution of the Copilot app that connects the tools people rely on with the next generation of capabilities they'll need to build, customize, and scale AI across work.
The Copilot app now includes three new capabilities: Home, where Chat and Copilot Cowork come together with the full power of Office; Code, powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, extending solution-building to more knowledge workers; and Autopilot, a persistent, proactive, and personal agent that keeps working even when you're not. Together, these new capabilities expand what customers can do with Copilot and the platform partners can build on.
We are also introducing platform innovations including Microsoft IQ, Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime, and an evolving commercial model with usage-based billing and FinOps for AI.
For Microsoft partners, the opportunity extends well beyond the product experience. Today's announcements advance Copilot across three connected dimensions: how people use AI, how customers adopt it commercially, and how partners build, extend, secure, govern, and manage it. That creates opportunities across AI advisory, security and governance, agent development and deployment, FinOps for AI, adoption and change management, software development, and ongoing managed services.
Learn more about today’s product announcement from Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer, AI at Work. (live 9/25)
What is new and why it matters for partners
One Copilot experience brings AI-powered work together
The new Copilot gives people access to the right capability for the work they want to accomplish:
- Home is the new starting point, bringing Chat—for questions, lookups, and drafts—together with Cowork, where work is delegated and returned as a completed result. Within the Home tab, Office in Copilot brings the full power of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into the app, creating and updating real, editable files that stay live for the whole team.
- Code turns natural-language ideas into apps, dashboards, automations, and workflows, with Copilot Managed Runtime providing the governed hosting infrastructure to run and share them inside Microsoft 365.
- Autopilot, previously called Scout, is a cloud-hosted digital teammate with its own identity, memory, and workspace that takes on work and keeps it moving within the permissions and boundaries the organization sets.
Together, these capabilities let people match the right tool to the job, while staying in the flow of work.
For partners, this creates opportunities to move customers beyond assistive productivity into business process transformation, grounded in the organization’s own data, and governed by the permissions and controls IT already sets.
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