Microsoft relaunches Copilot around agents that keep working while users are away

Microsoft relaunched its Copilot assistant around three capabilities it called Home, Code and Autopilot, described internally as its biggest update to the product to date. Home merges the existing Chat and Cowork modes into a single starting point and folds in “Office in Copilot,” letting a user draft or edit a real Word, Excel or PowerPoint file from inside the chat itself. Code lets non-developers describe a dashboard, widget or small internal app in natural language and have Copilot build and host it in a sandboxed environment, using the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot.

Autopilot — a renamed and expanded version of a feature Microsoft had been testing as “Scout” — is pitched as a persistent, cloud-hosted agent: given “a name, a role and a goal,” Microsoft said, it can watch channels, follow up on threads and carry out recurring, multi-step work such as a supplier review, continuing “while you sleep or your attention is elsewhere” without needing to be prompted again.

None of the three shipped broadly at launch. Home and Code are rolling out first through Microsoft’s Frontier early-access programme “in the coming weeks,” with Code reaching Microsoft 365 subscribers more generally later in the year; Autopilot moves only to private preview, from the end of September. The relaunch positions Microsoft alongside a wave of “always-on” agent launches from rivals, including Meta’s Muse three weeks earlier and, four days later, OpenAI’s own personal-agent launch at its DevDay conference.