How to Use Copilot Cowork: A First-Week Guide

Microsoft built Cowork with Anthropic, on the technology behind Claude Cowork. It's been generally available for work accounts since 16 June 2026 (personal accounts are still in preview).

What each user needs, per Microsoft: an active Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (now called Microsoft Copilot), usage-based and Cowork billing enabled, and a modern browser (Edge or Chrome recommended).

What the admin does: in the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Copilot > Cost Management > Configuration, select + Add spending policy, and on the Select agents and services step, pick Cowork. A policy with a limit of 1 credit still grants access. Limits can be set per tenant, group or user. The old Cowork entry under Agents > All Agents no longer controls anything, so don't waste time there.

The bill: Cowork isn't included in the licence. Each task is charged in Copilot Credits based on 4 inputs: model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. At the time of writing (September 2026), pay as you go is $0.01 per credit. Higher reasoning effort uses more credits. Microsoft publishes no fixed price per task and points admins to its Cowork cost estimator instead. The country-by-country licence prices are in Copilot licence cost in the UK and EU.

Go to copilot.cloud.microsoft and select Cowork in the toggle at the top, next to Chat. It also runs in Outlook, Teams, the Copilot desktop app and on mobile.

The home page gives you starter tasks: Catch me up, Organize my inbox, Organize my week, Prep for a meeting, Plan an event, Prepare for my 1:1, Research a company and Build an app. (Build an app uses the App skill, which is Frontier only for now.) I'd click Catch me up first. It's a gentle first task, and you see how Cowork works before it touches anything important.

To give it material, use the + button: Add work context (files, people, meetings), Upload images and files, or Attach cloud files from OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams. The prompt box takes up to 250,000 characters, so detail is welcome.

Microsoft's own comparison: Chat is for fast, focused, single tasks, answered in seconds to minutes. Cowork is for end-to-end work across several apps, and runs for minutes to hours.

My rule of thumb: if you'd want to check every step, use Chat. If you'd hand it to a colleague and come back later, use Cowork.

And agents? Microsoft calls Cowork an agentic system, "different from an agent", and describes agents as automating business processes from predefined instructions. My reading: an agent is built once for a repeatable process, Cowork takes whatever you delegate today. (That's my interpretation, not a Microsoft table.) For the research side of Copilot, see Researcher vs Analyst.

Microsoft's prompting advice for Cowork is to be specific. Their example: instead of "send an email", ask for the email, the audience, the content and the format. Here's that example, plus 4 of mine built on what Cowork can do:

Files Cowork creates land in the Cowork folder in your OneDrive. For quicker email jobs that don't need Cowork, try my Copilot prompts for Outlook.

Cowork can react to events. Two of Microsoft's examples:

You can also schedule prompts (up to 25) and manage them under Automations on the home page. Automated tasks have run limits, and Cowork guards against tasks that trigger themselves in a loop. Customize holds your custom instructions, up to 50 skills of your own, and plugins.

And read what it sends in your name before you get comfortable. It's your signature on those emails.

Cowork follows the same data residency model as Copilot. It processes your files in a temporary, isolated environment inside the Microsoft 365 service boundary and removes it when the task finishes.

The part European IT needs to know: Cowork can use Anthropic Claude models as a subprocessor for most of its reasoning and drafting. Anthropic models are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary and in-country processing commitments. That's why customers in the EU Data Boundary and in the UK have them disabled by default. An AI Administrator or Global Administrator can opt in under Copilot > Settings > View all > AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors. With Anthropic off, Cowork keeps working with the non-Anthropic models your organisation allows, such as the GPT models. Access is also limited to Anthropic-supported regions.

One honest flag: Microsoft's own Credits Guide lists "Anthropic enabled in the tenant" as a Cowork prerequisite, alongside the licence and the spending policy. That sits oddly next to the point above. Until Microsoft clears it up, have your admin confirm your actual tenant setup rather than assuming either page.

More on the European side in my Copilot GDPR and EU data residency guide.