Copilot Cowork is now generally available: what you get on day one

Update, 1 July 2026: Copilot Cowork billing grace period ends July 1 — what Frontier-program customers must do now

The billing grace period covered in the original post has now expired. As of today, all tenants that had Frontier-program users running Cowork between March 30 and June 16 are incurring live charges at production rates. This is a hard cutoff: any tenant without usage-based billing configured in the M365 Admin Center loses access to Cowork entirely, not just a warning.

To keep Cowork running, admins must go to M365 Admin Center, open the Copilot section, and select the Cowork tab to enable pay-as-you-go billing or connect prepaid capacity packs. Spending limits, group-level controls, and usage alerts are all available from the same Cost Management dashboard. As a quick audit tool, typing /cost in any completed task window returns the exact credits that task consumed.

One piece of new information worth factoring into cost planning: Microsoft has confirmed its own Cowork 1 model is releasing in the coming weeks. According to Microsoft’s GA post, internal testing across 125 runs showed Copilot Cowork running 30 to 40 percent cheaper than Claude-powered Cowork on comparable tasks, and Cowork 1 is positioned to reduce costs further. Independent verification of that figure is not yet available, so treat it as directional until third-party data emerges.

Update, 1 July 2026: Copilot Cowork Frontier billing grace period ends July 1 — credit-based charges now active for preview tenants

The billing grace period for Frontier preview tenants ends today. Tenants with at least one user who ran Cowork tasks during the March 30 to June 16 preview window were shielded from usage-based charges through June 30; all other tenants have been billed since GA on June 16. Either way, the operative deadline is now the same: usage-based billing must be configured in the Microsoft 365 admin center today or your tenant loses access to Cowork entirely. This is a hard cutoff, not a soft warning.

To configure billing, go to Copilot > Cost Management in the Microsoft 365 admin center and select Get Started. From there you can allocate Copilot Credits, set per-tenant, per-group, and per-user spending limits, and configure budget alerts. One important clarification from the Microsoft Learn cost management documentation: budget alerts trigger email notifications but do not enforce a hard stop on spending. Set explicit hard caps separately.

The $0.01 per credit pricing noted in the original post still applies. Light tasks run roughly 100 to 300 credits ($1 to $3); heavy multi-output tasks run 700 or more credits ($7+). After any task completes, type /cost in the Cowork task window to see exact credit consumption for that run.

Update, 29 June 2026: Copilot Cowork usage-based billing deadline is today — what Frontier customers must do before midnight

Two deadlines from the original GA story now land today rather than on a future date, so the billing grace period framing in the post below needs adjusting.

The harder deadline: Frontier-programme customers must configure usage-based Copilot Credits billing in the Microsoft 365 admin centre before midnight tonight. This is not a soft warning. Any tenant that has not connected an Azure subscription and enabled usage-based billing by June 30 will lose Cowork access entirely from July 1. Microsoft confirmed this in its Partner Center June 2026 announcements. Note that Cowork is off by default, so admins must act explicitly.

Before enabling billing, use the Customer Cowork Estimator to model likely spend, then set tenant-, group-, and user-level caps inside the Cost Management dashboard.

The pricing deadline: The Copilot Business promotional rate of $18 per user per month also expires tonight, with the standard price rising to $21 on July 1. However, Microsoft’s pricing page now indicates the promotional rate may have been extended to September 30, 2026 for some purchasing paths. Verify your specific channel agreement before assuming the extension applies.

Separately, Microsoft 365 base plan prices increase globally from July 1 across Business, E, and F series plans for all new and renewing customers.

Update, 29 June 2026: Hard Deadline: Copilot Cowork Frontier Customers Must Set Up Usage-Based Billing by June 30

The July 1 billing grace period mentioned at launch is now one day away, and Microsoft has confirmed it will not be extended. Frontier-program customers who used Cowork between March 30 and June 16 must enable usage-based billing in the Microsoft 365 admin center by June 30, 2026, or lose access to Cowork entirely on July 1. This is a hard shutoff, not a soft warning.

Every other tenant has been on consumption-based billing since general availability on June 16. The Frontier grace period applies only to tenants with at least one user who actively used Cowork during the Frontier program.

To act now, go to Copilot > Cost Management in the Microsoft 365 admin center and select Get Started. You can choose prepaid, pay-as-you-go, or existing capacity billing, set spending policies, and apply hard caps. Use the Cowork Estimator to model expected credit usage before committing. Full setup guidance is available on Microsoft Learn.

Pricing remains $0.01 per credit. Cowork stays disabled by default, and your existing Copilot license cost is unaffected. Only consumption after billing is enabled will be charged.

Update, 17 June 2026: Fabric IQ lands in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Chat for Frontier users — Power BI data now answerable via natural language in Microsoft 365

Alongside the Copilot Cowork GA covered below, Microsoft shipped Fabric IQ for Frontier customers, adding Power BI data answering to both Copilot Cowork and Copilot Chat within the Microsoft 365 Copilot surface.

The Fabric IQ plugin is installed by default in Copilot Cowork for Frontier users. It grounds a Cowork conversation in governed Power BI reports and semantic models, and the result can feed directly into other Cowork skills, such as drafting a document or scheduling a review, inside the same chat thread. Copilot Chat gains the same grounding capability, letting business users pull in Power BI numbers without switching to the Power BI service. Users reference a report by pasting a link, naming it, or using the attachment menu.

Permissions carry over as expected: queries run as the signed-in user, and both row-level security and object-level security on the underlying semantic model are respected. No additional Fabric capacity or PPU license is required beyond what the Power BI content already needs.

Key current limits: Fabric IQ grounds on reports and semantic models only, not on dashboards, paginated reports, or other Fabric items. Cowork responses do not include citations back to the source report today, so verify figures in the source before acting on them.

Full details are in the Cowork and Copilot Chat documentation on Microsoft Learn.

Update, 17 June 2026: Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service plugins for Copilot Cowork are now generally available

The original post covered Copilot Cowork’s nine launch plugins at GA. This is an addendum: Microsoft simultaneously shipped generally available Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service plugins for Cowork on June 16, making them part of the day-one GA picture.

The plugins let sellers and service agents run account prep, case triage, drafting, and CRM updates from within Microsoft 365. Every write action — record updates, drafted emails, case resolutions — is proposed by Cowork and requires human approval before anything is committed. Cowork does not access Dynamics 365 directly; it calls a governed set of Model Context Protocol plugins that enforce your existing identity and permission model on every request.

A few things admins should note right away. Both plugins are enabled by default and must be actively disabled in the Microsoft 365 admin center if not wanted, unlike other Cowork plugins which are off until an admin turns them on. Users connecting for the first time select the Power Platform environment they want to work with and authenticate via Microsoft Entra ID. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required. All interactions are captured in Microsoft Purview audit logs under Copilot activities at no extra cost.

At launch, the plugins are scoped to out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 data, so heavily customized environments may encounter limitations.

Update, 17 June 2026: Copilot Cowork GA: GPT-5.5 Thinking, Microsoft Purview integration, branded templates, and browser use now live

The initial GA announcement captured pricing and plugins accurately, but undersold the compliance surface and overstated model availability for standard customers.

On models: Cowork runs on Anthropic Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 at GA, with Auto mode selecting the best fit per task. GPT-5.5 Thinking is Frontier-only. Cowork 1, designed for everyday tasks at lower cost, is coming soon.

On governance: the full Microsoft Purview integration is live today, not roadmap. Audit logs, eDiscovery, DSPM, and Insider Risk Management are all active at GA. Sensitivity labels are inherited end-to-end. Data Lifecycle Management reaches GA on June 22; DLP support is still pending. This materially changes the enterprise readiness picture described in the original post.

Two additional GA capabilities were not covered: branded templates and image creation (powered by ChatGPT Images 2.0) are available now, and admin-enabled browser use runs through Microsoft Edge under existing enterprise controls, including Purview audit and Entra identity. It is off by default and requires admin activation.

The June 30 billing deadline for Frontier customers remains unchanged. Full admin guidance covering model toggles, browser controls, and Purview configuration is available on Microsoft Learn. The original announcement is on the Microsoft 365 Blog.

Update, 17 June 2026: Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service plugins for Copilot Cowork hit GA

The day after Copilot Cowork reached general availability, Microsoft confirmed that Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service are both GA as Cowork plugins. This expands the day-one plugin count beyond the nine listed at launch and marks the first production-ready CRM integration for Cowork’s agentic layer.

The Sales plugin covers account preparation, pipeline reviews, and CRM record updates. The Customer Service plugin adds case enrichment, next-step suggestions, customer-ready response drafting, and incident resolution. Both plugins read and write through Microsoft Dataverse, but all writes require explicit human approval before anything is committed. Cowork proposes changes; users approve, edit, or dismiss them.

Existing Dynamics 365 security roles are enforced throughout. Users can only reach records they already have access to in the application directly. Both plugins use Microsoft Entra ID authentication and require users to select a Dynamics 365 environment on first use, though Cowork selects automatically if only one environment is available. A linked Power Platform environment is also required.

Both integrations are enabled by default and can be disabled in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Full plugin details are documented on Microsoft Learn.

Microsoft made Copilot Cowork generally available worldwide on June 16, 2026. After three months in Frontier preview, the agentic task execution layer inside Microsoft 365 Copilot is now open to all Microsoft 365 Copilot customers, with a new in-app toggle, nine launch partner plugins, consumption-based pricing at $0.01 per credit, and a compliance surface that plugs into existing Microsoft 365 controls.

Here is a precise look at what is live right now and what it means in practice.

What Copilot Cowork actually does

Copilot Chat answers questions and helps you draft things. Cowork is different. You hand it a task, and it executes it end-to-end: drafting documents, building spreadsheets, sending emails, pulling data from connected tools, and returning a finished result. Tasks run in the cloud, so they continue even when your device is off.

Microsoft describes it as an agentic system designed for complex, long-running, multi-tool work. The key distinction is delegation rather than assistance.

The new toggle and how you access it

On day one, access comes through a new Cowork toggle inside the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. You switch from Copilot Chat into Cowork from within the same interface. No separate product, no separate login.

One important note for admins: Cowork is off by default at the tenant level. Administrators control when it is enabled, who can access it, and how much can be spent. Spending limits can be set at the tenant, group, and user level, with usage alerts configurable by threshold and recipient.

Nine launch partner plugins, available now

Nine partner plugins are live at GA:

• Enosix (SAP integration)
• Harvey (legal AI)
• LSEG (financial data)
• Miro (visual collaboration)
• monday.com (project management)
• Moody’s (credit and risk data)
• Morningstar (investment research)
• S&P Global Energy (energy market data)
• TeamsMaestro (Teams governance)

Databricks is also available today via sideloading, with a full plugin store listing coming soon. A second wave including Adobe, Atlassian, Box, Canva, CB Insights, MoneyForward, and Templafy is in progress.

Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and ERP apps, plus Microsoft Fabric, are also generally available with Cowork today.

The plugin architecture uses the standard M365 app package format, so organisations can build their own using the same tooling they already use for Teams apps and Copilot agents. Skills are written in Markdown using the Agent Skills open standard, which is also supported by Claude Code, VS Code Copilot, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and JetBrains Junie.

How the pricing works

This is where Copilot Cowork diverges most clearly from the flat per-seat model Microsoft has used for the past two decades.

Cowork uses Copilot Credits, priced at $0.01 per credit on pay-as-you-go. A P3 plan lets you commit to a volume in advance for a discount.

The cost of each task is calculated from four inputs: model use, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime. Microsoft classifies tasks as light, medium, or heavy based on reasoning depth and the number of knowledge sources involved. You pay for what Cowork actually does, not a fixed monthly seat fee on top of your existing licence.

To put that in context: you still need a Microsoft 365 Copilot user licence to access Cowork. The credits are charged separately on top of that, for actual usage.

Charles Lamanna described it as “like filling up your gas tank at the pump.” Microsoft has also said a lower-cost Azure-hosted model called Cowork 1 is coming, which should reduce per-task costs further once it ships.

The compliance surface

For IT and compliance teams, this is arguably the most important part of the GA announcement.

Cowork prompts, responses, and generated artifacts flow through existing Microsoft 365 controls. The compliance surface at GA includes:

• Audit log
• Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
• eDiscovery
• Insider Risk Management
• Data Lifecycle Management (rolling out globally over the week following GA)
• Communication Compliance policies

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is listed as coming soon. Sensitivity labels are inherited and displayed end-to-end, and all data stays within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary.

This matters because agentic AI acting on behalf of users creates new governance questions. Microsoft’s answer here is to route Cowork through the same compliance plumbing you already manage, rather than adding a separate layer.

The July 1 grace period for Frontier customers

If your organisation had at least one user in the Frontier program between March 30 and June 16 who used Cowork during that period, you have a grace period. Usage-based billing does not kick in until July 1, 2026.

The timeline is straightforward: GA launched June 16, the grace period runs through June 30, and from July 1 onwards, active Cowork usage requires usage-based billing to be configured. Frontier customers who have not set up billing before that date will lose access until they do.

What this means for you

If you are a Microsoft 365 Copilot customer, Cowork is now available to enable. The immediate practical questions are:

• Do you want to turn it on, and for whom?
• What spending limits make sense at the tenant, group, and user level?
• Do any of the nine launch plugins connect to tools your organisation already uses?
• Is your compliance team aware that Cowork outputs are subject to the same eDiscovery and audit controls as other M365 content?

For Frontier customers specifically, the billing transition deadline is real. June 30 is the last day of the grace period.

For everyone else, this is a measured GA with sensible admin controls, a clear per-task pricing model, and a compliance story that should make enterprise governance conversations easier rather than harder. The plugin roster will grow, and the forthcoming Cowork 1 model should bring costs down. For now, what ships on day one is already a meaningful step beyond Copilot Chat.