Copilot Licensing · 6 min read
Cowork's New Effort Selector: You Now Decide How Hard Your Agent Works
By James Wilkinson 22 August 2026
Copilot Cowork's new effort selector lets you decide how hard an AI agent works and what it costs. What it signals about the agentic era and how to use it well.
TL;DR
- Cowork now has five effort levels: Light, Medium, High, Extra High and Max. Medium is the default.
- Higher effort gives the agent more room to reason, but it takes longer and burns your credit limit faster.
- Effort sits alongside the model picker, so users have two levers: which AI does the work and how hard it works.
- This is what agentic pricing looks like: you pay for the work performed, not a seat licence, and effort is your throttle.
- The /cost command shows what a task has consumed, which makes effort discipline easy to build into a team.
Copilot Cowork is Microsoft’s agentic system. You describe an outcome, it builds a plan, pulls context from your emails, files, meetings and data, then works through the steps and hands you the result. It’s the clearest picture yet of where Microsoft thinks work is going: you delegate, the agent delivers. (New to Cowork or unsure how it differs from Copilot Chat? Start with Copilot Chat vs Cowork: what’s actually different? and come back.)
Microsoft has just added something to that picture. An effort selector now sits in the Cowork task box, right next to the model picker, and it lets you decide how much thinking your agent puts into a task before you press go.
This is a bigger deal than it looks, because agentic AI doesn’t come with a flat monthly price. Cowork bills by usage, in Copilot Credits, and effort is now the most direct control over that spend Microsoft has ever put in front of an end user. If your firm is moving into agents, or planning to, this feature tells you a lot about how the whole category is going to work.
What the effort selector does
When you hand work to an agent, the quality of the result depends on how much room the agent has to think: how deeply it reasons, how much of its own work it checks, how far it digs into your data. The effort selector controls exactly that.
The slider runs from Faster to Smarter, with five stops:
- Light for simple, low-stakes tasks
- Medium the default, a sensible balance for everyday delegated work
- High for deeper analysis or more complex reasoning
- Extra High when the task needs a genuinely thorough pass
- Max for your hardest work
Microsoft’s guidance is refreshingly plain: higher effort produces more thorough results but takes longer and uses your limits faster. The tooltip on Max says it uses the most credits, can run slower and is best saved for the hardest tasks. When the vendor tells you not to run the most expensive setting by default, believe them.
If this slider looks familiar, it’s because Claude Code has had the same Faster to Smarter control for a while. That’s no coincidence: Anthropic worked with Microsoft to build Cowork, and features tend to show up in Claude before a version lands in Copilot. If you want a feel for where Microsoft’s agentic tools are heading, the Claude app is often the best preview available.
Why this matters: agents are priced like staff, not software
Here’s the shift the effort selector makes visible. Traditional software has a seat price. You pay per user per month and usage is effectively free. Agentic AI doesn’t work like that. Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence but includes no Cowork usage in it. The agent’s actual work is metered in Copilot Credits, and consumption scales with the job: which models run, how much context gets retrieved, how many actions the agent takes and how long it runs.
In other words, an agent is priced more like a member of staff than a piece of software. A quick job costs a little. A deep, multi-source, multi-step job costs a lot. And just as you wouldn’t put your most senior person on every trivial task, you now shouldn’t run every Cowork task at Max.
The effort selector is the first tool that lets users act on that logic directly. It’s a delegation decision: how much is this task worth?
Two levers: which agent, and how hard it works
The effort selector sits next to the model picker and they do different jobs, so it’s worth keeping them straight.
The model picker chooses which AI handles the task. Auto is the default and picks for you. The effort selector chooses how hard that AI works. The same model on Light and on Max behaves very differently: one gives a quick pass, the other works the problem properly.
For most people the right setup is simple: leave the model on Auto and use effort as your main control. Don’t think about which AI to use, think about how much the task matters. If you do want to understand the model side, our guide to the Copilot model picker covers when switching from the default earns its keep.
Matching effort to the work you delegate
The judgement to build, for yourself and your team, is this: does the task need deep reasoning, or does it just need doing?
Light or Medium territory: inbox triage, quick document edits, summarising a meeting, reformatting, routine drafting. High-volume, low-complexity delegation. Running these at Max is paying senior rates for junior work.
High, Extra High or Max territory: multi-source research, data analysis, long multi-step workflows, anything client-facing or board-facing, anything where a shallow answer costs more than the credits saved. This is where the extra reasoning earns its keep.
Watch for the failure mode nobody expects. It usually isn’t people burning credits at Max on trivia. It’s the opposite: someone runs a genuinely hard task on Medium, gets a mediocre result and concludes the agent isn’t very good. Effort cuts both ways. Part of adopting agents well is giving hard work the effort it deserves.
The habit that keeps agentic spend honest
Usage-based AI rewards firms that measure. Cowork gives you the tool for free: type /cost in any task and it shows the approximate credits that task has consumed and what’s left of your monthly limit.
So here’s the habit we’d build into any team starting with Cowork. Run tasks on Medium by default. Type /cost when they finish. Keep a simple log of the task and what it cost. Within a couple of weeks you’ll have something no forecast can give you: real numbers on which of your workflows are cheap to delegate, which are expensive and which are worth turning the effort up for. That log becomes the basis for sensible credit budgets, sensible agent use cases and sensible conversations about where automation pays. It sits naturally alongside the ten habits that keep Copilot Credits under control, which cover the briefing, scoping and admin-side controls.
That’s the wider lesson in this small slider. The agentic era isn’t just about what AI can do, it’s about learning what each piece of delegated work is worth. Firms that build that judgement early will get dramatically more from their credit spend than firms that leave every dial on default and hope.
Want to go further with Cowork and agents?
Cowork is the general-purpose end of Microsoft’s agent story. Beyond it sit purpose-built agents: grounded in your own documents and systems, running your specific workflows, governed inside your Microsoft 365 environment. Both are worth understanding, and the credit economics above apply to all of it, including the harness Copilot Studio now builds on.
That’s the work we do at FiveForward: designing and building agents for your firm, and running agent workshops for the people who will build and look after them. The Agent Journey shows where Cowork sits on that path and pricing is fixed and published. If you want to talk through where to start, book a free 30 minute consultation. No pitch, no obligation.
Sources checked
Last checked: 22 August 2026.
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