Copilot Gets a Seat in the Org Chart

If you’ve followed Mike Taylor’s coverage of Microsoft, you know the scale of what the company has been assembling: 80 products called “Copilot” at last count—powerful when configured correctly and locked down without a cooperative IT department. Ryan Sloan attended Microsoft’s latest launch to test the new unified Copilot app, which rolls chat, code, Office, and a persistent agent called Autopilot into one interface. He found that the controls that make Copilot trustworthy inside a big company are the same ones that keep it from finishing a routine task. Read on for his dispatch from Redmond.—Kate Lee

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In August, Mike Taylor counted 80 Microsoft products called “Copilot.” Among them, he said, were some of the best tools for building agents—if you could navigate onboarding and enterprise IT administration.

At a launch event earlier this week in Seattle and Redmond, where I spoke with executives and briefly tried the app on the demo floor, Microsoft announced a new Copilot that combines chat, code, Office, and a persistent agent called Autopilot, replacing its separate consumer and work chat apps. Microsoft isn’t alone in attempting a unified interface for AI work, but its advantage is that the people it’s built for already spend their day in Outlook and Teams, with permissions their IT department set years ago.

Autopilot may be the most interesting piece of the new Copilot: It can work on its own and access most of what you can. Those permissions could make it useful and trustworthy inside a company, but they could also prevent it from completing an ordinary task. Microsoft’s own emphasis on evaluations (evals) at the launch event suggests that it is looking to its customers to define what good work looks like in their organizations and test whether Autopilot improves on current workflows.