Microsoft’s new Copilot Cowork joins Anthropic’s Claude in the release of a new E7 license category
Microsoft introduced Copilot Cowork, a new AI assistant that can run tasks in the background, create documents, and work across Microsoft 365 apps, the company announced Monday.
The product integrates technology from Claude’s Anthropic family of models into Microsoft’s existing Copilot assistant, the latest example of Microsoft growing beyond its strong partnership with OpenAI. Anthropic already offers Claude Cowork on its platform.
It comes as Microsoft tries to increase adoption of Copilot, which remains a small fraction of its commercial user base amid massive investments in AI infrastructure.
Copilot Cowork is part of what Microsoft calls Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also announced a new $99 per-user Microsoft 365 E7 tier launched May 1 — the new tier of its business technology licensing program — that includes Copilot, identity management tools, and a new $15 Agent 365 product for managing AIs.
The E7 category costs 65% more than the current $60 E5 subscription.
“Customers have told us that E5 alone is no longer enough; they don’t want multiple tools bundled together, they want one reliable solution,” wrote Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, in a blog post.
Microsoft says that Copilot Cowork can handle multiple tasks at once, extracting the user’s calendar, email, and files to complete work without constant supervision.
“Copilot Chat already makes it easy to research topics and brainstorm ideas, and Copilot Cowork lets you take action and complete tasks in the background to get more work done every time,” said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s president of Business Applications & Agents, in a demo video.
In the video, Lamanna showed Copilot Cowork analyzing a month of meetings with direct reports, integrating customer notes from business trips, and generating a competitive analysis with a compatible Word document and Excel spreadsheet.
The company emphasized the role of Work IQ, its intelligence layer that connects Copilot with user work patterns, relationships, and content across Microsoft 365.
Copilot Cowork works within the confines of Microsoft 365 for security and compliance, with actions and results automatically auditable. Microsoft pitches its multi-model approach as a differentiator, saying it will choose the right model for each job regardless of vendor.
The announcement brought mixed reactions. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of “Co-Intelligence” who studies AI adoption, raised the question on LinkedIn.
“Will it continue to use inferior models or older models without telling you how Copilot is doing?” Mollick wrote. He also questioned whether Microsoft would keep the product updated, noting that the standalone Anthropic Cowork product was “built in a few weeks using Claude Code and is updated and evolving quickly.”
Microsoft, he added, “has a habit of launching a great product and then letting it sit for a while,” noting that he was “curious to see if its trajectory will change.”
Copilot Cowork is available in limited research preview and will roll out to the Microsoft Frontier program later this month.
