Microsoft is adding three new capabilities to Copilot: Home, Code and Autopilot. Home and Code will reach testers through the Frontier program within the coming weeks, while Autopilot moves into private preview at the end of this month. No price figures were disclosed for any of the new capabilities, and Microsoft gave no specific date for the Frontier rollout beyond the coming weeks.
Home merges Chat and Cowork into a single place. Office in Copilot puts Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside Copilot, producing files a person can edit and share with teammates through @mentions. Excel now flags what changed in a sheet and why, and suggests the best chart, while PowerPoint keeps decks on brand and accepts custom templates. Skills add role-specific help, such as financial expertise in Excel and legal expertise in Word.
Code is built on the same technology as GitHub Copilot. It runs sandboxed and can be hosted inside a company's own tenant, letting people describe widgets, dashboards and internal cloud apps in natural language. Code reaches Frontier testers at the end of this month, with wider availability to follow in the coming weeks.
Autopilot, previously called Scout, is cloud-hosted, and Microsoft says it keeps working without waiting to be prompted and without constant monitoring. It lives in a tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, and shows up in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents. It can be summoned with @mentions and is governed by permissions, audit and governance controls.
The Microsoft Copilot Managed Runtime has entered preview, and Microsoft says it will also be reachable from inside Code. It hosts code within a company's Microsoft 365 environment and supports apps built in Cowork, Code and Copilot Studio. Microsoft says the runtime is opening to third-party and pro-code developers.
Fabric IQ, which brings Power BI semantic models into Copilot, is generally available in Chat and Cowork today. Microsoft says those models number more than 20 million. A Code integration is coming through Frontier soon, and Copilot grounded in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data enters public preview over the coming month.
A new plugin registry is rolling out now and is set to be generally available across surfaces in the coming weeks. It unifies Microsoft, partner and custom-built plugins, lets IT approve and manage them centrally, and lets developers and partners publish once to extend Copilot. Microsoft also announced FinOps for AI capabilities to manage Copilot and agent spending.
Billing is splitting in two. A user subscription license covers Copilot in Chat, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, while usage-based billing applies to Cowork, Code, Autopilot and long-running agentic capabilities. The frontier models Astra and Fable run on usage-based billing, and Microsoft says Copilot pricing is evolving alongside AI capabilities. Auto routes each request by accuracy, speed and cost, and Copilot will eventually route work to Chat, Cowork or Code on its own, a feature the company says is coming soon.
The announcement follows Microsoft 365 G7, unveiled September 15 for government agencies, and the May 28 redesign of the Copilot app. Microsoft 365 Business with Copilot SKUs were set to launch July 1.
