Microsoft is rebuilding the Copilot app around three work surfaces — Home, Code, and Autopilot — in a bid to make its assistant the place where chat, document work, app building, and long-running agents meet. Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work, laid out the redesign in a company blog post on September 25, 2026.
Home is the new starting point. It combines Chat and Cowork in one place, and with what Microsoft calls Office in Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are built into the experience so Copilot can create or update live, editable documents, workbooks, and presentations. Microsoft said a user can ask from Home for a launch brief, a budget model, or a deck — or pick up a file a team is already working on — and get a real Office file that stays live for colleagues. The Next Web reported that teammates can work those files at the same time.
Code is the surprise for a knowledge-worker app: describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation, or workflow in natural language, and Copilot chooses an approach and builds it, from desktop widgets to cloud-hosted internal apps shared with a team. “Powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, Code runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely within your tenant,” Spataro wrote, as quoted by The Verge. Microsoft said professional developers keep using GitHub Copilot for day-to-day coding, with more connectivity into the Copilot platform. A companion Managed Runtime, now in preview, is meant to host that code inside the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant boundary under IT governance.
Autopilot is the persistent agent piece. Previously called Scout when it was unveiled at Build earlier this year, it is now framed as a cloud-hosted “digital teammate” that keeps working without a prompt — watching channels, chasing follow-ups, and picking projects back up days later. “Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, and it’s built on Microsoft IQ so it understands how your organization actually works,” Spataro said, per The Verge.
The billing split is as important as the tabs. Microsoft said a user subscription license still covers Copilot in Chat and across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new long-running agentic capabilities, and frontier models including Astra and Fable run on usage-based billing, the company said — a split The Verge and The Next Web also reported. Microsoft did not publish retail prices for the metered work in the announcement.
Almost none of this is general availability yet. Microsoft said Home and Code will start rolling out in its Frontier early-access program in the coming weeks, Autopilot is expanding to private preview at the end of the month, and Code will be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year. The same company post also says Code reaches Frontier at the end of the month. The Verge compared the redesign to Office’s role in the PC era; The Next Web, citing CNBC, said fewer than 7% of more than 450 million commercial Office 365 seats have Copilot licenses.
The bet is product architecture plus a meter: Microsoft is packaging agentic assistance for Windows and Microsoft 365 customers while charging for the expensive pieces and tying Code to GitHub Copilot’s stack and tenant-hosted runtimes. Until Frontier and private preview widen, the story is the hub design and the usage bill — not a broad commercial launch.