Microsoft on Friday unveiled the biggest overhaul of its Copilot AI assistant to date, folding Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly into the Copilot experience in an effort to make AI the entry point for its famous productivity suite.
In the coming weeks, individual Microsoft 365 subscribers and businesses enrolled in its testing programme will be able to create, edit and share files in Copilot without switching from one application to another, the company said.
The move, announced by chief executive Satya Nadella on social media, pits Microsoft directly against OpenAI and Anthropic, which each launched their own document-creation tools in recent months.
It marks a major shift in how the software giant sees the future of work: not apps that bolt on AI features, but a single AI interface where the work itself happens.
Word, Excel and PowerPoint live inside Copilot now
At the centre of the revamp is Home, a new starting point that combines Copilot's AI chat with a feature called Cowork and the full Office suite. Users can work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents directly within Copilot, creating and editing files without repeatedly hopping between separate applications.
“Many people have put simplified document viewers into their products over the course of the last year. But this is full-blown Office,” Jacob Andreou, an executive vice president in charge of Copilot, told AFP.
Microsoft says Home is designed to become the starting point for work, bringing together conversations, files, applications and AI assistance in one place.
Code and Autopilot bring building and autonomous agents together
The second major addition is Code, powered by the technology behind GitHub Copilot. It lets anyone — not just software developers — build small tools such as trackers, dashboards or automated workflows by describing what they need in plain language, running inside a secure, sandboxed environment within a company's own systems.
The third pillar is Autopilot, previously known as Scout. Microsoft describes it as a digital teammate that can be assigned a name, role and goal.
It works independently — following up on tasks, managing schedules and keeping projects moving even when no one is actively using it — and can be tagged in conversations across Teams, Outlook and other Microsoft tools, much like a colleague. It remains limited to a handful of clients for now.
A race to own the AI workspace
The overhaul lands at a moment of intense competition. Copilot runs primarily on models from OpenAI and Anthropic — both key Microsoft suppliers — even as the company builds its own in-house models, which currently power only a few products such as GitHub's coding tool.
Nadella on Wednesday compared the arrival of these AI tools in the workplace to the advent of the personal computer, when an Excel spreadsheet sent by email gradually replaced typed internal memos sent by fax.
He also stressed the need for companies to be able to switch between AI models without losing their data or know-how — a challenge Microsoft says its new setup is designed to handle.
A low-cost model for routine tasks, announced in June, has not launched yet. The new Copilot features will roll out through Microsoft's Frontier programme in the coming weeks.
