On September 25, 2026, Microsoft's Jared Spataro introduced what the company calls a completely new Copilot app, replacing the old split between consumer and commercial Copilot with one experience organised around three surfaces. Home combines chat with "Cowork", which hands off multi-step tasks that run end to end and come back finished, and it puts Word, Excel and PowerPoint inside the same window. Code lets non-developers describe a desktop widget, dashboard or internal app in plain language and have Copilot build it. Microsoft says Code uses GitHub Copilot technology, runs in a sandbox, and can be hosted inside the customer's tenant. Autopilot is described as a "persistent, proactive and personal agent that keeps working even when you're not". Users @mention it in Teams, Outlook and documents the way they would a colleague.
The rollout is staged. Home and Code go to Microsoft's Frontier early-access program "in the coming weeks", and Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of the month. Nothing here is generally available yet except Fabric IQ, which connects Copilot to Power BI's semantic models, and a plugin registry that is rolling out now.
What is new is less the agent than the administrative scaffolding shipped around it. Microsoft says Autopilot operates "with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace" inside the tenant, under permissions, audit and governance controls. IT approves plugins centrally through the registry. FinOps controls let administrators set spending policies at scale through an API. That last item is the tell. An agent that "keeps working even when you're not" also keeps spending, and Microsoft is treating agent cost as something to budget like cloud resources rather than a flat per-seat licence.
Code is the bigger organisational shift. Letting business users generate tenant-hosted internal apps creates a new category of software that nobody on the engineering team wrote, reviewed or owns. The sandbox and tenant hosting limit what that software can reach. They do not answer who maintains it, who is paged when it breaks, or how it gets retired.
What is still uncertain: Microsoft has not published pricing for Autopilot or Code, has not said how Autopilot's memory is scoped or reviewed, and preview programs routinely narrow scope before general availability. Watch the Frontier release notes more than the keynote language.
The new Copilot moves agent governance -- identity, plugin approval, spend policy -- into the productivity suite itself; the open question is ownership of the apps and standing work that non-developers will now create.