Microsoft’s workplace assistant stopped being a chat window on 25 September. In a blog post titled “Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot”, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work, set out a rebuilt Copilot that creates Word, Excel and PowerPoint files inside its own interface, builds and hosts internal apps from a plain-English description, and runs an always-on agent that keeps working after its owner logs off.

The billing line is the part that changes the budget conversation. Everyday Copilot features stay on Microsoft’s per-seat user subscription licence; the new building and delegating features do not. Code, Autopilot and Microsoft’s Cowork agent all run on usage-based billing, metered in Copilot Credits, so the capabilities most useful to a small marketing operations team now scale with use rather than headcount. The shift follows HubSpot’s test of seats-plus-credits pricing in Europe in September, and it reaches a large installed base: Microsoft reported more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats in its July earnings, a count of licences sold rather than of daily users.

What has Microsoft added to Copilot?

Microsoft has split the new Copilot into three areas, Home, Code and Autopilot, and brought its Office apps inside it. Home gathers meetings, documents, email, apps and agents into one starting view and reaches customers through Microsoft’s Frontier early-access programme in the coming weeks. Code takes a description of a dashboard, tracker, automation or internal app and builds it, using GitHub Copilot technology in a sandboxed environment, according to Tom’s Hardware. Finished apps can run inside an organisation’s own Microsoft 365 boundary on Copilot Managed Runtime, which is in preview now.

Code began rolling out to Frontier customers at the end of September, with a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers promised later in 2026. Office in Copilot lets users create and edit Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint decks without leaving Copilot, with files kept in sync with the desktop apps. Microsoft has not given that part a separate date. The office-suite contest is getting crowded: The Helm reported on 22 September that Anthropic had added Docs and Slides to Claude.

Code is the feature with the shortest path to daily use in a marketing department. Campaign trackers, pipeline reporting views and simple request forms are the small tools that wait weeks behind engineering and data work. Microsoft’s announcement describes what Code is designed to do, not how reliably non-technical staff can build something they would trust with live numbers. Someone still has to own the data sources, access rights and upkeep of whatever Code produces, and marketing teams already build their own AI tools with the hours going uncounted.

How does Autopilot work, and who controls it?

Autopilot is the renamed and expanded version of Scout, the agent Microsoft introduced in June. It runs in the cloud inside an organisation’s tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. Microsoft’s examples show it monitoring Teams channels and email, chasing updates and picking up recurring work across several days. VentureBeat reported that Microsoft’s Entra service supplies the agent’s identity, while Agent 365 handles its permissions, audit records and administrative controls.

That design treats the agent less like a feature and more like a colleague with a login. Annie Pearl, Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of Copilot product, told Reuters that security, compliance and governance concerns had made it hard for organisations to bring agents into the enterprise, and that Microsoft had built the new tools to be usable there.

The detail behind that promise is thinner. Microsoft’s launch material does not set out action-by-action approval rules or explain what happens when a task fails, VentureBeat noted, and The Helm found no independent security assessment of the identity model. Autopilot is expanding in private preview with no general availability date. A marketing operations team weighing it for channel monitoring or follow-up chasing would need to know which systems the agent can reach, who owns its account and how its actions are reviewed before handing it anything that touches a customer.

What will the new Copilot cost?

Microsoft has divided Copilot spending into two models. The user subscription licence covers Copilot Chat and Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Usage-based billing covers what Spataro listed as Cowork, Code and Autopilot, new long-running agentic capabilities, and frontier models including Astra and Fable.

The unit is the Copilot Credit, which Microsoft’s licensing guidance prices at under 1p ($0.01) on pay-as-you-go, with pre-purchase discounts of 5% to 20% depending on volume. The announcement does not say how many credits a Code build or an Autopilot task consumes, so the cost of a given marketing workflow cannot yet be worked out from Microsoft’s own material. Microsoft told its sales force in July to pitch its AI on cost; this launch is the first where that cost is metered by the task.

The controls arrive alongside the meter under a label Microsoft calls FinOps for AI. Users can see their credit consumption, remaining balance and usage history inside Copilot, and administrators set spending policies and choose which models are available. VentureBeat reported that metered services stay switched off until an administrator sets a spending policy, which puts the first decision about Code or Autopilot with IT and finance rather than with the team that wants to use them. FinOps support for Copilot Studio agents is scheduled for October.

Microsoft’s next large stage is Ignite, its annual conference, in San Francisco and online from 17 to 20 November. The company has not said whether per-task pricing for Code and Autopilot will be published before then.