Something Big Just Happened

On March 9, 2026, Microsoft announced what it is calling Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The headline feature is Copilot Cowork — a cloud-based AI agent that can execute multi-step tasks across Microsoft 365 apps on your behalf, without you manually switching between them. It was built in close collaboration with Anthropic and is powered by Anthropic's Claude as its reasoning engine.

This is not a feature update. It is an architectural shift in how Microsoft 365 works — and it has significant implications for any organisation that runs on the Microsoft stack.

What Copilot Cowork Actually Does

Previous versions of Copilot were reactive. You prompted them, they responded, and the interaction ended. Copilot Cowork is different. It is designed to take a goal and pursue it across multiple apps, over multiple steps, without requiring you to stay in the loop at each stage.

In practical terms: you brief Cowork on a task — say, preparing a competitor analysis briefing for a Monday leadership meeting. Cowork can pull relevant emails and Teams threads, search SharePoint for prior research, synthesise the information using Claude's reasoning, draft a Word document, format it according to your organisation's brand kit in PowerPoint, and post a summary in your Teams channel — all from a single instruction.

The underlying intelligence layer making this possible is what Microsoft calls Work IQ: a contextual graph drawn from your emails, calendar, files, meetings, and chats. Unlike Anthropic's standalone Claude Cowork desktop application — which runs locally and only sees files you explicitly share with it — Copilot Cowork runs in the cloud inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, where it has access to your full enterprise data graph, covered by Microsoft's existing data protection and compliance controls.

How Claude Fits In

Copilot Cowork uses Claude as its core reasoning model — the intelligence doing the actual thinking, planning, and drafting behind each task. Microsoft's contribution is the enterprise wrapper: tenant-level security, Work IQ grounding, integration with the full Microsoft 365 app surface, and Agent 365, the governance and monitoring layer that tracks what agents are doing across your organisation.

Beyond Cowork, Claude is now available in mainline Copilot Chat for Frontier programme users — meaning you can choose Claude as your model directly in everyday Copilot conversations, not just in specialised agent features. Microsoft has taken a multi-model approach, allowing per-agent model selection, so organisations can route different workloads to Claude or OpenAI's models based on what each does best.

What This Means for Your Business

The practical implications depend on where you sit in your AI adoption journey.

If your organisation is still in the exploration phase with Copilot, Cowork is the feature that should accelerate your timeline. It represents the most tangible demonstration yet of what AI agents can do in a real enterprise context — not in a sandbox demo, but inside the tools your teams already use every day.

If you are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot, Cowork is the evolution you have been waiting for. The shift from prompt-and-respond to goal-and-execute is where the productivity gains become genuinely transformational rather than incremental.

If you have been evaluating AI tools but holding back on committing, the Copilot Cowork launch — and the broader Wave 3 announcement — is a strong signal that the Microsoft platform is the most mature and enterprise-ready environment for agentic AI right now.

What Comes Next

Copilot Cowork is currently in Research Preview with select customers and will expand through Microsoft's Frontier programme in late March 2026. Agent 365 — the governance control plane that monitors, secures, and governs all agents across your organisation — is generally available from May 1, priced at $15 per user per month.

At Trim Journey, we help organisations understand exactly where Copilot agents can trim the most time from their workflows — and how to deploy them without disrupting what already works. Book a 30-minute call to map your first Cowork use case.