This is Microsoft's new "Copilot Cowork": An experiment with Anthropic's Claude AI models that plans and delegates your work

Microsoft recently announced that "Copilot Cowork" is now available via its Frontier program. It's designed to help you delegate and handle a wide range of tasks at work, including creating plans and reasoning across your tools and files.

Availability was previously limited to a few users in Research Preview, but it has now shipped to the Frontier program, which means Microsoft 365 customers can opt in to the experimental feature before it ships more broadly.

Users can ask the AI-powered Copilot Cowork to initiate multiple tasks simultaneously and manage them via a new dashboard. It's worth noting that the new Copilot Cowork experience is powered by Anthropic's Claude Cowork.

"With skills from Claude and Microsoft built in, such as calendar management and daily briefing, Copilot Cowork can handle everything from one-off tasks to repeatable workflows like a monthly budget review," Microsoft added.

Copilot Cowork should be available via Microsoft's new 365 E7 AI subscription tier for $99/user/month. It'll be interesting to see whether the new subscription tier delivers value with better discounts following the new additions to the package.

Alongside shipping Copilot Cowork to more users via its Frontier program, Microsoft has made major improvements to its Researcher AI agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot. The AI agent will now have access to both OpenAI and Anthropic’s models, enabling it to tackle complex tasks more effectively by analyzing and synthesizing information across diverse sources.

As such, users can expect more accurate, insightful, and helpful responses to their queries. Additionally, Researcher is also getting a new feature called Critique, which will leverage different models from Anthropic and OpenAI to separate generation from evaluation. "One model plans the task and creates an initial draft, while a second model focuses on refinement, acting as an expert reviewer before the final report is produced," Microsoft added.

Plus, Researcher is also getting a new "Model Council" selection, which will let users compare responses from different models side by side. This will allow users to see where the models agree and disagree. "It’s like having multiple researchers at your fingertips."

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