Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on licence (requires M365 E3 or E5 base). The licence is the access gate; Cowork usage is billed separately on consumption (Copilot Credits — see the Billing section). As of June 16, 2026 Cowork is generally available worldwide — Frontier enrolment is no longer required.
EU / EFTA / UK tenants only: Anthropic is disabled by default. Admin must enable it at admin.microsoft.com → Copilot → Settings → AI providers before Cowork works for any user in the tenant.
| Use case | What you describe | For |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting follow-up | Find my Teams transcript, draft and send the follow-up email to all attendees | Anyone who runs meetings |
| Weekly status post | Every Friday, pull my project emails, draft the Teams update, post after I approve | Project manager · Team lead |
| Focus time protection | Find gaps in my next 5 days, propose 90-min focus blocks, create them after I confirm | Anyone in back-to-back meetings |
| Commitment tracking | Find every "I'll send / I'll follow up" in my emails from the last 14 days, flag overdue | Account manager · Consultant |
| Conflict resolution | Find calendar conflicts next 7 days, propose resolutions, reschedule after I approve each | Manager · Executive |
| Renewal outreach | Search my history with [contact], draft a brief personalised email, send after I approve | Account manager · Customer success |
| Aspect | Copilot Chat | Copilot Cowork |
|---|---|---|
| Output | A draft or answer — you decide what to do with it | An action taken — email sent, event created, post published |
| Execution | You read, copy, paste, act manually | Cowork executes; pauses for your approval at each step |
| Time span | Single response, immediate | Multi-step, runs over minutes with checkpoints |
| Steering | Static response; you decide next turn | You can interrupt, redirect, pause, or cancel mid-task |
| Scheduled tasks | Not available | Up to 5 recurring prompts that run on a schedule |
| Custom skills | Not available | Up to 50 saved instruction sets, auto-loaded per conversation |
Your M365 Copilot licence is the access gate. Cowork usage is billed separately on a consumption currency Microsoft calls Copilot Credits. Pay-as-you-go is $0.01 per credit; a commit-for-discount plan ("P3") is available for tenants that want a lower rate against a usage commitment. Usage billing is off by default — an admin must turn it on before any Cowork task will run.
Tenants that had a Cowork Frontier user during the preview window (Mar 30 – Jun 16, 2026) are not billed for Cowork usage until July 1, 2026. Use the grace window to set spending limits and alerts before the meter starts.
Goal: Send a follow-up email after my last meeting. Inputs: Find the Teams transcript or my notes from the last 2 hours. Step 1: Extract action items (what, owner, deadline), decisions made, and open questions. Show me this list and wait for my confirmation before proceeding. Step 2: Draft a follow-up email to all attendees with the above structure. Step 3: Show me the full draft and the complete recipient list. Wait for my explicit approval. Step 4: Send only after I approve.
How to create a scheduled prompt: Describe the task to Cowork and include a time — "every Monday at 7 AM" or "every Friday at 4 PM." Cowork will propose the schedule and ask you to activate it. Manage existing schedules under Tasks → Scheduled tab. Each scheduled run still requires your approval before Cowork acts.
A skill is a saved instruction set — a SKILL.md file stored in your OneDrive. Cowork reads all your skills at the start of every conversation and knows to use them when a matching task comes up.
Limit: Up to 50 skills per user.
Storage path:/Documents/Cowork/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md
Create a subfolder per skill, then create SKILL.md inside it. You can also add up to 20 companion files per skill (templates, reference docs) — stored in the same folder.
Updating a skill: Open the SKILL.md file in OneDrive and edit it directly. Changes take effect at the next conversation. Or ask Cowork to update the skill during a conversation — it will modify the file if you confirm.
--- name: Weekly Project Update description: Posts a structured weekly update to a Teams channel from the last 7 days of project emails and Teams messages. --- # Instructions below Every Friday at 4 PM, search emails and Teams from the last 7 days for [project name]. Draft a Teams post: - ✅ Done this week - 🔄 In progress - 🚫 Blocked (with owner) - 📅 Next week Show me the draft. Wait for approval. Post only after I confirm.
Cowork reads from your M365 environment — email, Teams, calendar, files. It does not access systems outside M365, cannot read locally stored files, and cannot retrieve information from the internet.
Cowork is built on Anthropic's Claude model, which operates as a Microsoft subprocessor. In EU, EFTA, and UK tenants, Anthropic is disabled by default because data may be processed outside the EU Data Boundary.
To enable: admin.microsoft.com → Copilot → Settings → View All → AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors → Anthropic → Enable. This requires an admin to explicitly acknowledge that data will leave the EU Data Boundary. Users cannot enable this themselves — it requires tenant-level admin action.
Cowork searches the wrong time window. Without a time boundary in your prompt, Cowork may pull from too broad a range (months of email instead of the last 7 days). Always state the window explicitly: "from the last 14 days," "since Monday," "from this week's meetings only."
The draft email includes the wrong recipients. Cowork infers recipients from context — which can produce unexpected results if a contact has multiple email addresses or if CC patterns from old threads are picked up. Always review the full recipient list before approving send.
A scheduled prompt fails silently. If a scheduled prompt encounters an error (no transcript found, a Teams channel permission changed), it may produce an empty or partial result without a visible error message. Check the Tasks panel for run history if a scheduled prompt seems to have not executed.
A custom skill is not applied to the task. Skills are matched by description at the start of the conversation. If the skill description is too vague, Cowork may not recognise that it applies. Write skill descriptions as specific outcome statements: "Generates the weekly HSE summary report for a named project from the last 7 days of incident data" rather than "weekly report."
Cowork cannot find the meeting transcript. Transcripts require Teams Meeting Recording to be enabled and the meeting to have ended. If the recording was off, or if the meeting was outside Teams, there is no transcript for Cowork to read. In that case, paste your own notes directly into the prompt.