Microsoft launches Copilot "super app" unifying chat, code and agents

Microsoft today unveiled a redesigned Copilot it is calling a "super app," comparing its potential to that of the historic Office suite. The new application consolidates three distinct AI capabilities — chat, coding and autonomous agents — under a single interface split into three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot. At the same time, the company is rebranding Scout, the personal assistant introduced at the Build conference earlier this year, as Autopilot.

Home, Code, Autopilot

The Home tab serves as the primary entry point, merging Copilot Chat with Cowork. A planned Today feature will surface a personalized dashboard of important emails, meeting requests, Teams threads and more. According to Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer for AI at Work, Home is designed to give users quick orientation, action suggestions and the ability to resume work exactly where they left off.

The Code tab is the surprise: it lets any employee, not just developers, build applications, trackers, dashboards and automations and share them as internal apps stored in the cloud, all running in a sandboxed environment inside the enterprise tenant using the technology behind GitHub Copilot.

An agent that stays awake while you sleep

Autopilot, the third tab, is described by Spataro as a "digital colleague." Unlike the previous desktop version (Scout), the new release runs in the cloud and continues operating even when the user is offline. The agent has its own cloud computer instance, its own identity, memory and a separate workspace within the enterprise tenant, built on what Microsoft calls Microsoft IQ — a layer that understands the organization's structure, permissions and processes. It can be @mentioned in chats, channels, documents and emails just like a human colleague, with built-in permissioning, audit and governance controls.

Usage-based billing replaces flat licence

The most significant commercial shift is the move to usage-based billing for the Cowork, Code and Autopilot components. The standard Copilot licence — a per-user subscription — will continue to provide access to chat and integration across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with an automatic model picker selecting the right model for each task. However, long-running agentic capabilities or use of advanced models such as Astra and Fable will be priced separately based on actual consumption. IT administrators will be required to use Microsoft's new FinOps for AI tool to monitor spend and prevent uncontrolled overruns.

Finally a stable formula after many iterations

Since launching as a chatbot inside Bing, Copilot has undergone numerous redesigns, and the prolonged split between consumer and enterprise versions only hampered adoption. The unification of the two apps last month, alongside organizational changes that placed a single leader in charge of Copilot for the first time, paved the way for the current three-tab design. Microsoft is now betting that the combination of built-in enterprise security, presence in every daily work tool and a flexible pricing model will convince organizations to adopt the assistant at scale, after the initial launch wave yielded only partial adoption.