Microsoft has made Copilot Cowork generally available worldwide. It's the agentic side of Microsoft 365 Copilot: instead of returning a draft, it runs complex, long-running, multi-tool tasks end-to-end and hands back a finished result. After three months in the Frontier preview, Microsoft says more than half of the Fortune 500 are already using it.
If you manage Microsoft 365 for clients, this is one to get ahead of rather than read about later. A few things jump out.
It's off by default — which is good, but the clock is ticking
Cowork is off by default, and admins decide when to switch it on and who gets access. That's the right call, and it puts you in control. But "off by default" only helps if someone is actually making the decision per tenant. The moment a client asks for it — or an end user spots the toggle in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app — you want a position ready, not a scramble.
Worth flagging early: any tenant that had at least one Frontier user on Cowork between 30 March and 16 June gets a grace period and won't be billed until 1 July 2026. Everyone else, billing starts now.
Usage-based billing changes the conversation
This isn't a flat per-user add-on. Cowork needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, then bills on usage in Copilot Credits, priced on model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. PayGo is $0.01 per credit, or clients can commit to volume up front for a discount.
For MSPs, variable spend across a fleet of tenants is exactly the kind of thing that bites you at renewal. The good news is the controls are there at GA: spending limits at tenant, group and user level, customisable usage alerts, and usage reporting broken down by user, group and feature. Microsoft has also published a credit estimator spreadsheet if you want to model it per client. Setting budgets and alerts before usage ramps is a good first step.
The governance surface is wider than the headline
Cowork prompts, responses and generated artefacts flow through existing Microsoft 365 controls — audit log, DSPM, eDiscovery, Insider Risk Management, with Data Lifecycle Management arriving 22 June and DLP still to come. Sensitivity labels are inherited and shown end-to-end.
That's a lot to keep aligned across every tenant you run. An agent that browses the web via Edge and calls partner plugins is a bigger surface than chat ever was, and "governed by your existing policies" only holds if those policies are actually consistent tenant to tenant, and their configuration isn't drifting unknowingly.
The pattern here is familiar: a powerful new capability lands, and the value depends significantly on how well it's environment is governed. Copilot Cowork is worth the look for many SMBs who maybe previously passed on Copilot - it's fantastically powerful, but with great power comes great responsibility.
