Something Significant Just Happened

On March 9, 2026, Microsoft announced Copilot Cowork — the centrepiece of what it is calling Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If you work in an organisation that uses Microsoft 365, this is the most consequential AI announcement in years. Not because it is the most technically impressive thing ever built, but because it is the first agentic AI tool that lives where your work already lives — inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, with full access to your emails, documents, Teams conversations, calendar, and SharePoint files.

And it is built on Anthropic's Claude.

That combination — Microsoft's enterprise data infrastructure plus Claude's reasoning and agentic capabilities — is what makes Copilot Cowork categorically different from anything that came before it.

What Copilot Cowork Actually Does

Copilot Cowork is not a chatbot. It is not a smarter autocomplete. It is an AI agent that executes multi-step tasks across Microsoft 365 on your behalf, without you needing to stay involved at every step.

Here is what that looks like in practice. You brief Cowork in natural language — spoken or typed — and it goes to work. It can open a set of SharePoint documents, extract the relevant data, synthesise findings into a Word report, generate slides in PowerPoint, draft a summary email in Outlook, and post the update in a Teams channel — as a single workflow, triggered by a single instruction.

Earlier Microsoft Copilot features were app-specific: Copilot in Word helped you write, Copilot in Excel helped you analyse, Copilot in Teams helped you summarise meetings. Cowork breaks down those walls. It coordinates across applications as part of a single task execution — which is what makes it genuinely agentic rather than just AI-assisted.

Why Claude Is Powering It

Microsoft built Copilot Cowork in close collaboration with Anthropic, and the choice of Claude as its reasoning engine is not incidental. Claude's particular strengths — long-context reasoning, careful multi-step planning, and what Anthropic calls its "agentic harness" for using tools and navigating complex workflows — make it well-suited for the kind of extended, cross-application task execution that Cowork is designed for.

Microsoft's Jared Spataro described Cowork as using Claude as "the AI powering its reasoning" and the same agentic harness as Anthropic's standalone Claude Cowork product. The key difference is deployment: Anthropic's Claude Cowork runs locally on a user's device. Microsoft's Copilot Cowork runs in the cloud, inside the customer's Microsoft 365 infrastructure, covered by enterprise data protection and integrated with Work IQ — Microsoft's intelligence layer built from your organisation's work graph.

This is not just a technical distinction. It means Copilot Cowork can see and act on your real enterprise data — email threads, meeting history, file versions, colleague relationships — in a way that a locally-running desktop agent simply cannot.

What Is Work IQ?

Work IQ is the intelligence layer that makes Copilot Cowork genuinely contextual. It is built from the full graph of a user's Microsoft 365 activity: emails sent and received, meetings attended, documents created and edited, chats in Teams, files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive.

When Cowork executes a task, it does not do so blindly. It understands who the key stakeholders are, what projects are active, what was said in the last three meetings on a topic, and which version of a document is current. That context is what separates a competent agent from a generic one.

For organisations, Work IQ is also what makes Cowork secure. All agent actions happen within existing Microsoft 365 permissions and sensitivity labels. Cowork cannot access data the user is not already authorised to see, and every action is logged and auditable.

What This Means for Your Business

For organisations that have already invested in Microsoft 365, Copilot Cowork is not an add-on to evaluate — it is the beginning of a fundamental shift in how work gets done. The administrative, coordination, and synthesis tasks that consume the largest share of knowledge worker time are now within reach of automation that is actually grounded in your real data, not a generic AI that knows nothing about your organisation.

The practical questions are about sequencing. Which workflows benefit most from Cowork's multi-app execution capability? Where does human judgment need to stay in the loop? How do you govern agents as they proliferate across departments? Microsoft's Agent 365 product — a control plane for managing all AI agents across an organisation, generally available from May 1, 2026 at $15 per user per month — is the answer to that last question.

At Trim Journey, we help organisations map their highest-value workflows to AI agents, deploy them properly, and govern them responsibly. The Copilot Cowork launch makes this work more urgent and more impactful than it has ever been. Book a 30-minute call to talk through what Cowork means for your specific workflows.