Product9 publishers3 min readPublished
Microsoft moves Copilot's hand-off features onto usage billing in a rebuilt desktop app
Microsoft's rebuilt Copilot app bills Cowork, Code and Autopilot by usage while Chat stays on per-user licenses. Companies piloting it will pay in step with how much work staff hand to the agent, so the useful measure is tasks it finishes.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- The desktop app now splits into Home, Code and Autopilot tabs, and Home combines Chat with Cowork, the multi-step agent first offered in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
- Office documents that Copilot creates from the Home tab sync with the Office apps and can be shared with coworkers.
- Autopilot opens Scout, an OpenClaw-powered work agent that Spataro called a "digital teammate" with its own computer and access to the organization's data.
- Home and Code reach Frontier program organizations in the coming weeks, and Autopilot opens as a private preview at the end of the month.
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Why it matters
- cost Autopilot runs in the cloud while staff sleep, so a recurring job bills against usage on every run, whether or not anyone reviews the output the next morning.
- exposure An agent that answers threads and chases stakeholders without input sends messages to suppliers and colleagues with no person approving each one, so admins must set what it may send and to whom.
- constraint Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro customers must wait for a Code preview later in the year before they can measure what the metered coding tab costs them.
Microsoft's own example for the new Copilot app is a supplier review. "It can do things like set up and manage a full supplier review process: building the schedule and workback plan, then handling prep, meetings, and follow-ups on its own, right down to reaching out to stakeholders for updates," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer of AI at Work, wrote [10]. The person who asked for it can log off. "Autopilot is cloud-hosted, so it keeps working while you sleep or your attention is elsewhere," Spataro said [11].
Spataro pitched the release in large terms. "Just as Office defined productivity for the PC era, Copilot is defining work for the AI era," he said [16]. The thing being shipped is a desktop app with tabs and a price list. Under that price list, three of the four modes a user can reach are metered [19]. Thurrott reports the pricing change is meant to help organizations manage their AI spend [22].
A pilot report that counts seats and weekly chat users is describing the licensed half of the product, the half that costs the same whether anyone delegates anything [15]. The meter will show how often staff handed work over. It will not show whether the work came back finished or had to be redone.
Choosing a mode is also about to get harder to see. Spataro said that soon "you won't need to choose a mode" [17], with Copilot sending each request to Chat, Cowork, Code or whichever capability suits it [18]. With this billing split, the router also decides whether a request lands on the seat license or the meter. Microsoft has not said whether users will be told when a request moves to a metered mode.
Engadget set the release against Microsoft possibly "taking a step back from shoving AI and Copilot features into Windows" [1]. For IT, the governance work moves into one app that holds chat, coding and the agent [2]. Its Code tab syncs with the standalone GitHub Copilot service [6], and How-To Geek reports it is sandboxed so it should not run loose on the network [8].
The recommendation for a Frontier pilot is to sort tasks before switching on the metered tabs. Use two tests: whether the task recurs, and whether its owner can check the result without redoing it. Recurring, easy-to-check work, such as chasing weekly status updates, is the best case for paying Autopilot's meter. If the work recurs but is hard to check, it bills every cycle and needs a reviewer every cycle, so it belongs in Cowork with a human sign-off. Easy one-offs can stay in Chat, which the seat license already covers. Hard one-offs cost the most to delegate and save the least. The tradeoff is that a pilot started in the first box will undercount what the agent can do on a project the size of Spataro's supplier review. It will also give finance a number it can check: tasks finished per unit of metered spend.
What to watch
- The per-use rates Microsoft sets for Cowork, Code and Autopilot once Frontier customers start receiving metered bills.
- The admin controls that ship with Autopilot's private preview at the end of the month, especially limits on outreach to people outside the company.
- The Today command center's October private preview in Outlook and Teams, and whether its drafted emails and schedules also run on the meter.