Microsoft has announced a significant expansion of Copilot Cowork, its AI-powered task delegation system inside Microsoft 365. Writing on the Microsoft 365 blog, Charles Lamanna — Executive Vice President of Business Applications and Agents — outlined new mobile support, reusable workflow “skills,” and a raft of third-party integrations that bring Cowork closer to functioning as a genuine AI colleague rather than a chat assistant.
What Is Copilot Cowork?
Copilot Cowork is Microsoft’s evolution of Copilot from a conversational tool into one that can take action. Rather than simply answering questions or drafting text, Cowork is designed to delegate and execute real workflows — across documents, data, and line-of-business applications — while the user gets on with other work. Underpinning it is the Work IQ Intelligence Layer, described by Microsoft as the foundation that enables Cowork to “plan, act, and produce outcomes grounded in how your business runs.”
The May 2026 update marks a notable step change in both reach and capability.
Mobile: Delegate Work From Anywhere
Copilot Cowork is now available on iOS and Android. Microsoft’s stated goal is to let users delegate work “the moment you think of it — on your commute, between meetings, or away from your desk.” Because the processing happens in the cloud, tasks can continue running in the background after they are assigned, with no need to keep a device active or stay connected.
For teams that are frequently away from their desks — field engineers, sales staff, or executives moving between meetings — this reduces the friction between identifying a task and getting it started. The work does not wait for a return to the office.
Cowork Skills: Standardising Repeatable Work
One of the more practically significant announcements is the introduction of Cowork Skills. Skills are reusable sets of instructions that guide Cowork through repeatable tasks — think of them as saved playbooks that can be triggered on demand.
Microsoft ships a set of built-in skills covering the most common workflows:
- Document creation and formatting
- Meeting coordination and follow-ups
- Research and summarisation tasks
More importantly for businesses, organisations can build custom skills to standardise their own processes and automate recurring work specific to their operations. This is where Cowork starts to look less like a generic AI assistant and more like an onboarded member of staff who already knows how your organisation prefers things done.
For IT teams and managed service providers, custom skills represent a way to encode institutional knowledge — whether that is an onboarding checklist, a procurement request process, or a weekly reporting workflow — and make it consistently reproducible without manual intervention each time.
New Integrations: Connecting Microsoft 365 to the Rest of the Business
Cowork’s usefulness scales with the number of systems it can access. The May update brings a set of native integrations that extend its reach well beyond core Microsoft 365 apps:
- Fabric IQ with Power BI — enabling data-driven workflows directly within Cowork, so tasks can pull live business intelligence without manual exports.
- Dynamics 365 — across sales, customer service, and ERP applications, allowing Cowork to interact with CRM records, service tickets, and operational data.
- Third-party platforms — including LSEG (financial data), Miro (collaborative whiteboards), monday.com (project management), and S&P Global Energy.
- Custom plugins — for organisations whose systems fall outside the standard integration catalogue.
The direction of travel is clear: Microsoft wants Cowork to sit at the centre of the business technology stack and act as an orchestration layer across tools that previously required manual handoffs between them.
Access: The Frontier Programme
Copilot Cowork is currently available through Microsoft’s Frontier programme, with new capabilities rolling out continuously. The Frontier programme gives organisations early access to Copilot features ahead of general availability, allowing IT teams to evaluate and prepare for wider deployment.
Organisations interested in accessing Cowork should review their current Microsoft 365 licensing, as Copilot features are typically tied to Microsoft 365 Copilot licences (currently available as an add-on to qualifying Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans).
What This Means for Your Business
The Cowork announcements reflect a broader shift in how Microsoft envisions AI within the workplace: not as a tool you query, but as a system that runs work on your behalf. For businesses already in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, the path to benefiting from these capabilities is relatively short — the infrastructure is already in place.
The key questions for IT decision-makers are practical ones:
- Which repetitive, high-volume workflows in your organisation are strong candidates for automation via Cowork Skills?
- Which line-of-business systems would deliver the most value if connected via Dynamics 365 or a custom plugin?
- Are your Microsoft 365 licences currently including Copilot, and if not, what is the cost-benefit case for adding it?
- How will your IT or security team govern what Cowork can access and act upon — particularly as it connects to sensitive business data in ERP or CRM systems?
That last point is worth pausing on. As AI tools gain the ability to take real actions — sending emails, updating records, generating documents — the governance and access control questions become as important as the productivity ones. Ensuring that Cowork operates within well-defined data access boundaries is an IT and security responsibility, not just an end-user one.
If you would like help reviewing your Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness, assessing licensing options, or putting appropriate governance controls in place before a wider Cowork rollout, get in touch with the BIT Tech team.
