Copilot Cowork Review

The strange part of Copilot Cowork is who built the engine. Microsoft spent the previous year diversifying away from a single supplier, and the agent it shipped in June leans on Anthropic's Claude models for the reasoning, with OpenAI still handling image generation. The result is the most useful thing in the Copilot line by a distance. Hand it a task that would take an analyst two days, close the laptop, and it keeps going, because the work runs server side rather than on your machine. Nine partner plugins landed at general availability, including Harvey, Miro, monday.com, Moody's, Morningstar and S and P Global Energy, which tells you exactly which industries Microsoft is aiming at.

Then comes the bill. Cowork does not ride along with your Copilot licence. It meters a unit called a Copilot Credit at one cent apiece under pay as you go, on top of the thirty dollars a seat that Microsoft 365 Copilot already costs, and the credit cost of a given task depends on the model it picks, how much organisational context it retrieves, how many tools it calls and how long it runs. Which is to say that nobody can quote you a number before the task finishes. Microsoft plainly knows this, because Cowork ships off by default with spending limits available at tenant, group and user level, and it gave Frontier preview tenants a grace period to July 1 rather than a surprise invoice.

So: a genuinely strong agent bolted to a pricing model that makes finance nervous and an approval path that makes IT slow. The capability grade and the setup grade are not having the same conversation. Pricing sits on top of Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30 per user a month, with Cowork itself billed pay as you go at a cent per Copilot Credit.