By Kasturi Datta |
The third wave of Microsoft 365 Copilot products – including Copilot Cowork, built on top of Anthropic’s AI model Claude, and a new business productivity software bundle called Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite – aim to help enterprises run agents in existing workflows and have a single point from which they can govern and secure agents.
Copilot Cowork is a new feature within Microsoft 365 Copilot built in collaboration with Anthropic to help users manage complex, multi-step projects by accessing relevant information through Work IQ, which finds patterns and insights from a user’s emails, files, documents, meetings and chats. It is powered by Anthropic’s Claude model and is currently being piloted with select customers.
Microsoft also announced that Anthropic’s Claude model is now available across the full Copilot Chat experience, expanding beyond its previous availability in Microsoft’s Researcher and Excel features. This marks Microsoft’s shift to a more flexible approach to powering Copilot, having initially built the platform on OpenAI’s models.
“Rather than betting on a single model, we built a system that makes every model useful at work,” said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, in a recent blog post.
As well as Copilot Cowork, the Frontier Suite combines Microsoft 365 E5, Copilot tools and Agent 365 and into one unified solution to help organisations drive productivity and growth with new agentic capabilities.
“Microsoft is not just imagining the future of AI, we are empowering organisations across industries and around the world to build it,” said Althoff.
Microsoft 365 E5 provides the latest versions of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Word, so users can build their own agents with enhanced Copilot chat features and real time AI insights.
Meanwhile, Agent 365 gives IT and security teams visibility across the entirety of an organisation from a single point so the activity of agents can be governed as they expand their reach. This will be generally available from 1 May 2026.