Microsoft's New Copilot App: Code, Autopilot and Usage Billing

Chat, Cowork, Office and Code in one app

Microsoft announced the new Copilot in a September 25 post by Jared Spataro, its chief marketing officer for AI at Work. Home becomes the starting point, putting Chat and Cowork, the agent that takes a delegated task and returns a finished result, in one place. Office in Copilot builds Word, Excel and PowerPoint into the app so Copilot can create and edit files colleagues work on at the same time. Fortune reported that Satya Nadella presented the app in Seattle two days earlier; the public announcement and coverage came on the 25th. [1][2]

Code is the new piece for people who do not write software. Microsoft describes it as a way to build small, purpose-built solutions, such as persistent desktop widgets, dashboards and hosted apps, running in a sandboxed environment on the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot. Microsoft also said that Copilot would soon route a request to Chat, Cowork or Code on its own, so users would not have to pick a mode. [1]

Autopilot, the agent formerly called Scout

Autopilot is the renamed Scout agent. Microsoft says it lives in the customer’s tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, takes a name, a role and a goal, and keeps working when the user is away, showing up in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents. Fortune’s examples include project updates, tracking decisions and deadlines, and reminding colleagues when commitments are due. The Next Web reported that it grew out of Microsoft’s experiments with OpenClaw. [1][2][3]

Nadella’s pitch was governance as much as autonomy. He told Fortune that everything an agent does should be governable by policy, as IT has long managed other systems. Microsoft’s post says IT can approve and manage plugins centrally and set spending policies through an API. [2][1]

A seat for chat, a meter for agents

The announcement splits Copilot’s pricing in two. A per-user subscription license covers Chat and Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with an Auto setting that picks a model for each request. Cowork, Code, Autopilot and frontier models such as Astra and Fable are billed by usage. [1][3]

Little of this was broadly available on September 25. Microsoft said Home and Code would start rolling out in its Frontier early-access program in the coming weeks and that Autopilot was expanding to private preview, which The Next Web and Windows Latest put at the end of September. Fortune reported no general availability date and said Code would reach Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later in 2026. [1][3][4][2]

Atlas interpretation: The release continues the agent push Microsoft began with Copilot Cowork in March, and it answers rivals that already bundle chat, coding and agents; The Next Web pointed to Anthropic, which had merged Claude chat and Cowork nine days earlier. Nadella described the goal on X as a new operating system for work. Whether that holds depends on preview programs that had not opened to most customers when the app was announced. [3][4][1]