Microsoft Thinks It’s Finally Figured Out Copilot This Time

Microsoft announced an updated version of Copilot on Friday, September 25, 2026, built around three modes: Autopilot, a cloud-run AI agent rebranded from Scout that handles long-running tasks without human oversight; a Code tab running on the same technology as GitHub Copilot and grounded in Microsoft IQ; and a Home screen chat interface with Chat and Cowork toggles. Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of Microsoft's AI at Work division, described Autopilot as a "digital teammate" that "keeps working while you sleep or your attention is elsewhere—no constant monitoring required," and said Code and Autopilot use usage-based billing with a selectable menu of frontier models including Fable and Astra. The launch follows Microsoft's rebranding of Bing Chat to Copilot for Microsoft 365 in March 2023, Copilot as a standalone product in September 2023, and Copilot+ PCs in May 2024, a brand the company is reportedly retiring after security concerns.

Microsoft’s ambitions over the past few years to build an AI assistant that can compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Claude have been a bit of a roller coaster. Now it’s hoping that all those ups and downs have finally paid off. The company announced https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/09/25/introducing-the-new-copilot-with-home-code-and-autopilot/ the launch of an updated version of Copilot on Friday, framing it as a one-stop-shop for AI-assisted work. It’s the latest in a long series of short-lived branding efforts: Microsoft launched Bing Chat in February 2023 before renaming it to Copilot for Microsoft 365 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-a-whole-new-way-to-work/ the following month. Then in September, Microsoft released Copilot as a standalone product https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/21/announcing-microsoft-copilot-your-everyday-ai-companion/ , before announcing https://blogs.bing.com/search/2023/11/our-vision-to-bring-microsoft-copilot-to-everyone-and-more/ less than a month later that Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise were being subsumed into Copilot. The following spring, the company unveiled https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copilot-pcs/ “a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI,” called Copilot+ PCs; the company is now reportedly https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/the-copilot-pc-brand-is-dead-microsoft-and-pc-makers-quietly-pull-back-on-tarnished-windows-11-ai-pc-branding getting rid of that name following security concerns that have tarnished the devices’ reputation. The latest Copilot centers on three modes, including Autopilot, which, as the name suggests, is an AI agent trained to handle long-running tasks without human oversight. It’s a rebranding of Scout https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/blog/2026/06/02/introducing-microsoft-scout-your-always-on-personal-agent/ , the “always on personal agent” that Microsoft launched within its 365 suite of apps at its Build developer conference in June. Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of Microsoft’s AI at Work division, described Autopilot in Friday’s announcement as a “digital teammate,” following a similar marketing tactic that other tech companies, like Slack https://gizmodo.com/slack-has-of-course-launched-a-vibe-coding-tool-2000800885 , have used to sell their own agents. It comes with a cutesy digital avatar that definitely doesn’t look anything remotely like the late Clippy https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-memorializes-clippy-by-making-it-an-emoji-1847300938 , and users can customize its name, tagging it in project chats just as they would a human coworker. It runs on the cloud rather than on-device, meaning, as Spataro put it in his blog post, “it keeps working while you sleep or your attention is elsewhere—no constant monitoring required.” Then there’s the new Code tab, which, according to Spataro, runs on the same technology as GitHub Copilot and is grounded in Microsoft IQ, meaning it only pulls from a user’s or business’ data shared across the company’s family of apps. “Describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in natural language, and Copilot chooses an approach and builds it—from persistent desktop widgets for quick reference and interactive dashboards for exploring data and testing outcomes to cloud-hosted internal apps you can share with your team,” Spataro wrote. Code and Autopilot charge on a usage-based billing model, meaning the price tag depends on the scope and complexity of a given task. Users can also select between a menu of frontier models, including Fable and Astra. The centerpiece of the new-and-improved Copilot is the Home screen, a UI that flags work updates like new emails or Teams messages and is dominated by a simple chat interface and an option to toggle between Chat and Cowork, depending on the task. According to Spataro, the company will soon update the Home page so that users don’t even need to manually select which mode they want to use; they can just enter a prompt, and Copilot will delegate automatically. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella first hinted https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-will-soon-release-an-ai-super-app-2000792653 in July that the company was working on an AI “super app spanning both consumer and commercial experiences,” promising it would mark “a major step forward” in Copilot’s capabilities. It was a page taken from its competitors’ playbooks: OpenAI fused Codex into the ChatGPT app https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-codex-chatgpt-app-releases-gpt-5-6-models-2026-7 in early July, and just last week, Anthropic integrated its Cowork feature with Claude chat https://fortune.com/2026/09/16/anthropic-merges-its-claude-chat-and-agentic-cowork-products-into-a-single-ai-assistant-as-part-of-a-push-to-build-an-ai-superapp/ . The idea in all these cases is to consolidate multiple product offerings into a single dashboard, thereby theoretically making it easier for users to get connected with the right tool for a particular task. While the AI boom began just a little under four years ago as a battle among developers to build the best chatbots, those same companies are now competing to effectively become the new operating systems for individual users and businesses. The new Copilot is “a new OS for work,” as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it in a Friday X post https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2103455884366188544 . The more proprietary features they can offer from a single app or dashboard, the less they’ll need to rely on third-party offerings—and the more user data gets funneled back into their ecosystems, further improving their AI models. Anthropic quietly started rolling out its own browser https://gizmodo.com/anthropic-is-quietly-cutting-google-out-of-the-equation-2000803895 within Claude Cowork last month, for example, negating the need for a Google Chrome connection.