Introducing Education for Cowork
Education leaders, educators, and researchers don't need another chat window. They need help with the work that takes up their weeks and semesters. Pulling evidence together for accreditation, rolling out AI to staff one wave at a time, rolling out a policy change, or keeping a research project moving across lots of inboxes and folders. Today we're introducing Education for Cowork, a Microsoft plugin for Microsoft Copilot Cowork. It adds 10 education skills for administrative and academic work in K-12 and Higher Education. The plugin is rolling out to customers worldwide and will be available directly inside Copilot Cowork, Microsoft Marketplace, and on GitHub. What is Education for Cowork? Copilot Cowork is the agentic experience in Microsoft Copilot. It works on longer, multistep tasks for you across your mail, calendar, Teams, and files. Plugins add skills to Cowork. Skills are prompt-based workflows that give Cowork expertise in a specific domain. Education for Cowork teaches Cowork how education institutions actually work: academic calendars, professional development windows, cohorts, standards and accreditation requirements, policies and handbooks, exit tickets, and course cycles. Each skill uses the content your institution already has in Microsoft 365. It isn't generic advice. Many of these skills keep state from one run to the next. A weekly brief carries decisions and owners into the next week. An evidence ledger tracks what changed since the last review. A rollout plan remembers which wave is open. Each time you return, Cowork builds on where you left off. The 10 skills For education and technology leaders Skill What it helps you do Weekly Brief for Education Keep a running weekly brief of priorities, commitments, decisions, risks, and open questions. It pulls from your calendar, meetings, messages, and files, and carries decisions and owners from week to week. AI Rollout & Role-Based Training Run a phased AI rollout for staff in a school, district, trust, college, university, or ministry. Covers cohorts, prerequisites, role-based learning paths, communications, and support readiness, with wave gates checked against the academic calendar. Policy Change Pack for Education Take an approved policy all the way to implementation. It compares versions, finds the affected procedures and audiences, assigns owners and deadlines, and drafts the communications. Evidence Package for Education Keep a requirement-to-evidence ledger for accreditation, program review, grant reporting, and research compliance. It shows gaps, owners, and how current each piece of evidence is before a submission. Governance Review for Education Give IT and governance teams a consistent pre-deployment review for agents, plugins, skills, connectors, and AI tools. It covers technical, policy, data, accessibility, ownership, and support evidence, and tracks revalidation dates. It prepares the approval record. People make the decision. For educators Skill What it helps you do Instructional Continuity (K-12) Keep a handover pack ready so a substitute or covering colleague can run the day. It includes current plans, schedules, routines, and materials, and is checked for privacy and freshness before an absence. Instructional Retrospective (Higher Ed) Keep a private, evidence-based retrospective of your own course across terms: what you changed, what the evidence suggests (counterevidence included), and which next-cycle actions you accepted. Accessible Learning Materials Audit and maintain accessible versions of lessons, readings, slides, and handouts. It checks alt text, reading level, and structure, and confirms each version still meets the original learning goals. Discussion Insights for Education Find group-level patterns in class discussions, exit tickets, and learner questions, such as recurring misconceptions and changes between cycles. It also checks whether last cycle's teaching response made a difference. For researchers Skill What it helps you do Research Project Brief Keep a living brief for a research project. It covers literature, methods, collaborator input, decisions, disagreements, milestones, and open questions, and flags sources that have gone stale. Try it: example prompts "Build my weekly brief and tell me what changed since last week." "Are we ready to open the next wave of our AI rollout?" "Build the policy change pack for the updated acceptable use policy." "Find the gaps in our accreditation evidence for Standard 4." "Run a governance review for this agent before we deploy it to our tenant." "I'll be out next week. Get my handover pack ready." "Audit this lesson set for accessibility." "What misconceptions came up in this week's exit tickets compared to last week?" "Did my course changes work? Run my course retrospective." "Update my research project brief before Thursday's lab meeting." Cowork picks the right skill based on what you ask for. If you know which skill you want to use, you can invoke it directly using "/" and the name of the skill. Get started with Education task ideas Cowork also includes Education-specific task ideas to help faculty and staff get started with common education workflows. These ready-to-use prompts take advantage of the context Cowork can access across your work and can be adapted to fit your specific needs. Education task ideas include: Plan my teaching week – Organize upcoming classes, preparation, follow-ups, and deadlines. Prepare a leadership brief – Bring together decisions, risks, commitments, and next steps. Check grant readiness – Map grant requirements to available evidence, owners, and gaps. Map our review evidence – Connect review criteria with supporting evidence and identify gaps. Find discussion patterns – Surface themes, misconceptions, and potential next teaching moves. Build an FAQ – Create a sourced FAQ from recurring questions and existing guidance. Explain a policy change – Turn an approved change into clear communications for the people affected. Plan our AI rollout – Develop a phased plan covering audiences, training, support, and launch readiness. You can find these and additional Education scenarios under Task ideas in Cowork. Designed for education, with responsible AI built in Education work involves learners, families, and sensitive records. Every skill in the plugin follows the same rules: People approve every action. Cowork asks for confirmation before it sends, publishes, or changes any record. Governance Review prepares an approval but never grants it. No individual student judgments. Discussion Insights reports group-level patterns only. Skills don't grade, rank, or assess individual learners, and they keep student records and individual support-plan details (such as an IEP or EHCP) out of their outputs. No evaluating colleagues. Instructional Retrospective is private to the instructor and declines any personnel, promotion, or performance-review use. Output you can review. Results keep facts, interpretation, recommendations, assumptions, and open questions separate, and show which sources were used and how current they are. Staff-only AI rollout. The AI rollout skill plans enablement for staff. It refers any request to roll out to learners elsewhere. All of this runs inside Microsoft 365. Cowork works with the user's own permissions and is covered by the security, compliance, and data residency controls your institution already uses for Microsoft 365 Copilot. For IT: what you need to make it work Education for Cowork is designed to be simple to deploy. It's a skills-only plugin: No EDU-specific license, connector, or app is required. No external services and no SSO. It includes no connectors, so users have no sign-in or consent flows to complete. No configuration. After it's enabled, the skills appear in Cowork automatically. The skills were designed to work in a production education tenant, where they can use your academic calendars, policies, course materials, and teaching evidence. Licensing and access prerequisites Requirement Details Microsoft 365 Copilot license Users who use Cowork plugins must have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned. Cowork access through usage-based billing Cowork uses usage-based billing (Copilot Credits). Admins grant access with a spending policy that selects Cowork: Microsoft 365 admin center > Copilot > Cost Management > Configuration > + Add spending policy, scoped to a security group (for example, staff or faculty), with Cowork selected as the service. Model responses and skill calls count toward consumption. Admin role To manage Cowork plugins, you need to be a tenant administrator or have the Copilot administrator role. Standard M365 services Users get the best results with Exchange Online (mail and calendar), OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, because that's where the skills find their source content. Note A spending policy controls access, not only budget. Anyone in the scope of a policy that selects Cowork can use Cowork, even with a very small credit limit. To keep a group out of Cowork, leave it out of every Cowork-selecting policy. Deploy or allow the plugin Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center. Go to Agents > Tools (or Agents > All agents) and search for Education for Cowork. Choose your rollout: Deploy to All users or Specific users/groups. The plugin is acquired automatically, shows the label Managed by your organization, and can't be removed by targeted users. Make available to all users or specific groups, so people can add it themselves from the Cowork Customize > Plugins page. Block it if you're not ready to roll it out yet. Use security groups to target specific roles (for example, Faculty, School Leaders, Research Staff). Plugin availability can't be scoped by country or region. Users can turn any plugin on or off for their own conversations from the Sources & Skills panel. Governance and monitoring Auditing: Cowork and plugin activity is recorded in Microsoft Purview audit logs under Copilot activities (included in Audit Standard). Data protection: Microsoft Purview DLP and your existing compliance policies apply to Cowork interactions. Usage and cost: Track adoption and consumption in the Cowork Usage report and the Copilot Credits consumption views in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Use the Cowork cost estimator to plan budgets per group. Known limitation: Microsoft Purview Information Barriers aren't currently supported for plugin or skill management and sharing. In tenants with Information Barriers enabled, embedded knowledge file uploads are blocked at the tenant level, which prevents affected plugins and skills from being uploaded or published. Get started IT: Confirm that Copilot licenses and a Cowork spending policy are in place, then deploy or allow Education for Cowork for a pilot group. Leaders, educators, and researchers: Open Cowork, check that Education for Cowork is turned on under Sources & Skills, and try one of the prompts above. Tell us what you think. We'll keep adding skills, connectors, and MCP servers based on what we learn from customers and partners. Share your feedback in the comments below. Learn more Manage Copilot Cowork for your organization Manage plugins for Copilot Cowork Microsoft Copilot requirements Responsible AI Overview for Cowork Education for Cowork plugin in the Microsoft MarketplaceMeasuring the value of Cowork: From AI interactions to completed work
You have invested in Copilot. Adoption is climbing, prompt volume is up, and your dashboards are full of engagement charts. Yet the question leadership keeps asking is: How do we quantify the value of AI when it helps us across so many kinds of work? Value has always been incredibly hard to define for software, and as a result organizations looked to signals like usage trends as a proxy. These metrics were good approximations of value and made sense in a world where products and product costs were simple. The only assumption you need to make is that monthly usage of a product is at least equal to the monthly cost of that product, and you're confident that your active usage numbers are correlated with positive ROI (i.e. value). With AI, usage is incredibly dispersed and produces a massive variety of outputs and outcomes, from simple to complex. Additionally, costs vary with usage, so the old proxy measures are likely insufficient for more complex tasks. Most AI assistance today is transactional. A person prompts, reads the response, and takes the next step themselves. Copilot Cowork works differently. People describe an outcome, and Cowork helps plan, execute, and deliver work across Microsoft 365, with checkpoints that keep users in control. It can work across emails, meetings, files, documents, calendars, and Teams, turning intent into completed actions rather than a single answer. A practical starting point for measuring Cowork value When AI moves from answering questions to completing work, value can no longer be measured by prompts alone. The Consumption Dashboard in Insights now uses Cowork assisted hours and value: a directional estimate of the time Cowork returns to people by helping complete a wide range of tasks, including long-running work. The metric builds on assisted hours with research-based methods tailored to Cowork’s varied outputs. These metrics remain a proxy, not a precise measure, and estimates are intentionally conservative. It does not account for things like quality improvements, faster decision making, quantity of sources reviewed, ability to take on additional work, run simultaneous tasks across projects, and more. The value your teams realize may be greater depending on the outcomes Cowork delivers. The rest of this post explains how we calculate the metric and why it offers a more useful and practical view of value than prompt counts. This evolution of measuring Cowork value should be viewed as a starting point to your value conversations, and just as important, we will continue to evolve this approach as new research, customer feedback, telemetry, and capabilities come forward. From counting prompts to understanding work With a typical AI assistant, a person prompts, reviews the response, and orchestrates what happens next. They move information between apps, refine the output, and turn it into something usable. In that model, prompts are a useful proxy for discrete assists. Cowork is different. A person sets the intent, and Cowork orchestrates the work: planning, gathering inputs, running tools, and producing deliverables. The unit of value is therefore the workload required to fulfill the goal—not a single prompt. That is why our measurement approach is evolving: from counting interactions to understanding the work AI helps complete. Start with intent We first organize activity around what a person intends to accomplish, grouping work into discrete tasks defined by their goal rather than by the number of turns or prompts. A task might be building a customer proposal, analyzing documents, preparing for a meeting, drafting a stakeholder update, or creating a briefing. This maps measurement more closely to business outcomes. For consistency, we use a classifier model to categorize tasks into eight common types of work: Analysis and research Document and content creation Email workflows Meeting workflows Communication workflows Specialized workflows Writing or debugging code General assistance This helps organizations understand not just that Cowork was used, but what kind of work it helped with. Break the task into real activities Next, we identify the typical activities required to complete each task. For example, document and content creation can involve gathering source material, understanding context, structuring the narrative, drafting, editing, formatting, and finalizing the deliverable. That is the work Cowork is completing, and it is why a task-based model tells you more than a prompt-based one based on counts. By breaking work into typical activities, we can create a clearer and more explainable view of where AI assistance is showing up. The goal is not to claim that every task is identical. The goal is to ground the estimate in the kind of work a person would normally need to do. The same logic is applied consistently across all eight task types, which is what lets leaders compare value across very different kinds of work. The image below is an example of the task categorization process. Informed by research, and built to be conservative An estimate is only useful if you trust it, so the methodology is built to be conservative and used as a starting point for value discussions. Without assistance, a person completes every step: switching tools, finding inputs, drafting, editing, formatting, and preparing the final output. With Cowork, the person sets the intent and remains in control while Cowork orchestrates parts of the workflow, including gathering inputs, generating artifacts, taking actions, and carrying context across tools. To value that work fairly, the methodology anchors task categories in published productivity research from Stanford, Microsoft Research, NBER, and Forrester[1]. It expresses time savings as conservative, typical, and optimistic ranges, allowing customers to interpret results using their own environment and assumptions. Every per-category band traces back to the supporting research, so you can see where a figure comes from and pressure-test it against your own experience. Categories are valued differently because the work differs. Document creation may include drafting, rewriting, formatting, and polishing, while analysis and research may require learning new material, weighing evidence, solving problems, and making recommendations. Read the full methodology here Cowork_Methodology.pdf Why this matters for leaders For leaders, the key question is not simply how much AI was used, but what work it helped accomplish and what value that might represent. A task-based approach helps answer more practical business questions: Where is Cowork helping with higher-complexity, multi-step work? How much capacity might be returned to teams? How does usage compare with cost and consumption? Where should we expand, govern, or optimize adoption? The dashboard image below shows a helpful visual representation of the different tasks Cowork is used for by assisted hours and credits used. From this view you can start to answer some of those key business questions like where to accelerate usage to potentially capture more value. This matters as AI becomes more agentic and usage-based. Customers need to understand usage, cost, and value together to guide rollout, governance, and investment. It is also important to be clear about what the metric represents. Assisted hours provide a directional estimate of capacity returned to people, helping organizations identify opportunities to create value and complement their own business outcome measurement. This is the next step, not the final answer AI value measurement must evolve with the technology. We will refine this approach as task-level signals improve and customers share feedback. But the direction is clear: as AI moves from assistance to orchestration, value will be defined less by interactions and more by the work AI helps people accomplish. Take a look at the Consumption Dashboard in Insights and view Cowork details to see your top Cowork tasks and assisted hours. You can learn more about this new Cowork report on MS Learn here. These views will also come to the Cowork report in the M365 admin center soon.
