The New Copilot Explained: Home, Code and Autopilot for Firms Without an IT Team

On Friday 25 September 2026 Microsoft rebuilt the Copilot app. Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer for AI at Work, set out the detail on the Microsoft Official Blog, and Satya Nadella called Copilot “a new OS for work”.

For a firm without an IT team, most of it will not arrive this month. One part will, and it is the part the headlines spend least time on: how Copilot is billed. Where Microsoft has not published something, we say so.

What Microsoft announced

The Copilot app has three new capabilities: Home, Code and Autopilot. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are now built into the app too, which Microsoft calls Office in Copilot.

Microsoft also says Copilot will soon route each request to Chat, Cowork or Code itself, so nobody has to pick a mode. No date has been given.

Home: Chat and Cowork in one place

Home shows recent activity and suggestions, and lets you pick up where you left off.

Chat is instant and conversational: quick questions, lookups and drafts. Cowork is for work you delegate. You define the task, it runs end to end and it returns a finished result, such as a customer briefing or a financial close package. Copilot Chat vs Cowork sets out the difference. Cowork has been generally available since 16 June 2026 and is already billed on usage.

Office in Copilot means you can ask from Home for a brief, a budget model or a deck and get a real, editable Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, created or updated for you. The file is live for the team, so a colleague’s edits show as they make them.

Coming later is Today, a proactive command centre across mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks that drafts the reply and proposes the schedule change for you. It goes to private preview in October, in Copilot first and later in Outlook and Teams.

Code: describe it and get an app

Code is a new tab where you describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in plain language, and Copilot chooses an approach and builds it. The result might be a desktop widget, an interactive dashboard or a cloud-hosted internal app you share with the team.

It uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandbox and can be hosted inside your tenant, meaning your organisation’s own Microsoft 365 environment. Developers keep using GitHub Copilot. Who owns what gets built is the subject of our Copilot Code explainer.

Autopilot: the agent that keeps working

Autopilot is the new name for Scout. You give it a name, a role and a goal. It watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks a project back up days later without a prompt. Because it is cloud-hosted, it carries on while you are elsewhere.

It lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. It shows up in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents. You can @mention it like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance behind it. We covered Scout twice in June, on what autopilots mean for professional services and what accountancy and law firms need to know. What has changed since is in Copilot Autopilot explained.

What happens to Copilot Studio and the agents you already have

The short answer: Copilot Studio is not going anywhere.

The announcement introduces Copilot Managed Runtime, now in preview. It is hosting that lets apps built in Cowork, Code and Copilot Studio run inside your company’s Microsoft 365 environment, governed by IT. Microsoft names Copilot Studio alongside Cowork and Code as one of the ways to build on it, and is opening it to third-party and pro-code developers too. Cost management in Agent 365, Microsoft’s admin and governance layer for agents, is expanding beyond Cowork and the Work IQ APIs to Code and Managed Runtime, with support for agents built in Copilot Studio planned for October.

Three smaller items round it off: a plugin registry that puts Microsoft, partner and custom plugins in one catalogue IT approves centrally (rolling out now, general availability across surfaces in the coming weeks); Copilot grounded in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data and workflows (public preview over the next month); and Fabric IQ, which uses the Power BI semantic models behind your reports as context, now generally available in Chat and Cowork.

What is actually available, and when

Several rows below say Frontier. The Frontier programme is Microsoft’s opt-in early-access programme, managed at tenant level in the Microsoft 365 admin centre; it needs a Copilot licence and is off by default, with a choice of No access, All users or Specific users. Everything in it is preview, so features may change or never ship.

No general availability dates have been given for Home, Code, Autopilot or Today. Microsoft has promised more detail at Ignite, 17 to 20 November 2026, in San Francisco and online.

The bill has two parts now

This part reaches every firm, whether or not anyone enrols in anything.

The first part is the user subscription licence, or USL: the fixed Copilot licence you already pay per user per month. It covers Copilot in Chat and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus model selection and new models. A setting called Auto picks the model for each request on accuracy, speed and cost.

The second part is usage-based billing, or UBB, paid in Copilot Credits, Microsoft’s usage currency for AI work the licence does not cover. Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new long-running agentic capabilities and frontier models run on it. Microsoft names Astra and Fable among those models, and we covered Fable in Claude Fable 5.1 in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio. UBB sits on top of the licence, not instead of it: you need the USL to use it at all. In Microsoft’s analogy, the licence is the battery for most driving at a fixed cost and usage-based billing is the fuel tank for extra range.

For enterprise customers, usage-based services stay off until an admin creates a spending policy in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and nothing is billed before that. Admins can also route credit requests into approval workflows and set which model families each group can use, which also limits what Auto can pick. End users can see their own credit usage and balance inside Copilot.

Microsoft has not published rates for Code or Autopilot, and we are not going to estimate them. Our Copilot Credits explainer covers what each existing workload draws and will be updated for Code and Autopilot. If moving numbers make you want to hold off altogether, read whether to wait for Microsoft to sort out agent pricing.

What a firm should do this month

1. Decide whether to enrol in Frontier at all. For most firms of this size the answer is no, or one small named group. Off by default is the right default.
2. Set the spending policy and cap first. Do it before anyone can switch on Cowork, Code or Autopilot. Nothing metered runs until you do, which is the one piece of good news in the pricing.
3. Name an owner for anything that gets built. That means a Copilot Studio agent today or a Code app next year. Why every agent needs an owner sets out the minimum.
4. Keep going with the agents you are already building. Copilot Studio is one of the three build routes Microsoft names for the new platform.

The bottom line

The new Copilot is mostly a preview for other people for now. The two things that reach you either way are the two-part bill and the need for an owner. If you are working out where an agent fits in your firm before any of this arrives, Discover is the fixed first step.

Sources checked

Last checked: 26 September 2026.

• Microsoft Official Blog, “Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot”, 25 September 2026
• Microsoft Tech Community, “Evolution of the Copilot pricing model”, 24 September 2026
• Microsoft Source EMEA, on the new Copilot bringing Home, Code and Autopilot together, 25 September 2026
• Microsoft 365 Blog, “Copilot Cowork is now generally available”, 16 June 2026
• Microsoft Learn, “What is Copilot Managed Runtime (preview)”
• Microsoft Learn, “Get started with the Microsoft Copilot Frontier Program”

Want a plain-English read on which parts of the new Copilot matter to your firm, and what to set up before any of it arrives? That is the work FiveForward does. Book a free consultation and we will start from the licences and agents you already have.