Microsoft Copilot Cowork became generally available on June 16, 2026, and it’s a different product from the Copilot your team is probably already using. Most organizations treat Copilot like a smart assistant. You ask it something and it answers. Cowork works more like a team member you can assign a task to, walk away from, and come back to when it’s done.
Reid Johnston, Teal Chief Intelligent Transformation Officer, has been demonstrating Cowork in Teal’s monthly virtual events since it entered preview. Here’s what it does, how it differs from Copilot Chat, and four places you can put it to work right now.
Key Takeaways
- Copilot Cowork is a reasoning agent that completes multi-step tasks.
- The biggest difference between Copilot Chat and Cowork is autonomy.
- Cowork tasks can be scheduled to repeat automatically, so recurring work runs without needing your attention.
- Custom skills let you codify how Cowork handles specific jobs, so you don’t have to re-explain the process every time.
Table of Contents
How Does Copilot Cowork Differ from Copilot Chat?
Copilot Chat is responsive. You stay in the conversation and it responds to your prompt live, similar to how you’d interact with any AI chatbot. Cowork, on the other hand, is autonomous. You assign a task and it works on its own, sometimes for several minutes, sometimes longer.
Reid Johnston explained it well in a recent Teal virtual event, “Chat is fast and focused. Cowork is a reasoning agent. You give it a task, it goes and does its thing while you go do something else.”
Copilot Chat | Copilot Cowork | |
|---|---|---|
Speed | Seconds | Minutes to hours |
How it works | You stay in the conversation while it answers live | You assign a task and Cowork completes it independently |
What it can do | Summarize, draft, answer questions, search your M365 data | Everything Chat does, plus it can create documents, send emails, update your calendar, and manipulate files |
Scheduling | No | Yes, tasks can repeat on a schedule |
Works while you're away | No | Yes |
4 Ways Your Team Can Use Copilot Cowork Right Now
1. Add prep time before every recurring meeting automatically.
If you have a calendar full of recurring meetings and rarely have time to prepare before them, this tip is worth trying in Cowork first.
Example prompt:
“Look at my calendar for next week. For any internal recurring meeting, add a 15-minute prep block in front of it, unless I already have a block scheduled before it.”
How to run it:
- Open Copilot Cowork from the Copilot app or browser.
- Type the prompt above, adjusted for your calendar week.
- Cowork reads your calendar, identifies recurring internal meetings, and creates prep blocks where they’re missing. This will take a few minutes, but you can watch Cowork complete its work.
- Check your calendar after it finishes to confirm the blocks landed correctly.
There’s one thing worth knowing. Because Cowork is a reasoning agent, it may occasionally stall or need a retry. This is expected behavior for a tool that’s doing multi-step work against live calendar data. In Teal’s testing, the task was completed successfully on a second attempt if the first attempt timed out.
2. Get a vendor or topic email digest sent to your inbox on a schedule.
Copilot Chat can search your inbox and summarize emails. Cowork does the same thing, and then sends you the results. But the great thing about using Cowork to do this is that it can repeat the whole process automatically every week without you having to re-prompt it.
Example prompt:
“Read my emails from the last 7 days from [Vendor Name] and send me a summary to my inbox.”
To make it recurring:
- Run the prompt once and confirm the summary looks right.
- In the same Cowork thread, add: “Schedule this to run every Monday night.”
- Cowork creates the recurring task automatically and shows it in your task list. Each time it runs, it opens a new session, pulls fresh data, and sends the email.
Note: When Cowork sends a message on your behalf, it adds a small ‘Sent by Copilot Cowork‘ label in the email. Microsoft adds this automatically so recipients know the message came from an automated task.
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3. Generate meeting summaries directly into your branded document template.
If you send clients meeting recaps after calls, this replaces the manual work of copying meeting notes into a formatted document.
How to set it up:
- Upload your branded Word template (with your logo, page numbers, and standard formatting) to your SharePoint or OneDrive.
- Open Cowork and type, “Summarize my [meeting name] from [date] and place the summary in this document template: [paste the SharePoint link to your template].”
- Cowork locates the meeting transcript, writes a structured summary, and saves a new document using your template format.
Gar Whaley asked Reid, during the event, whether Cowork could build a skill that also applies brand guidelines – so any document it creates automatically uses the right colors, tone, and formatting. The answer was yes, and Teal’s team has been testing exactly that.
4. Catch up on Teams messages after time away.
Copilot Chat has a limit on how many results it returns, roughly 10 items per query. Cowork doesn’t have the same cap, which makes it more reliable for catching up on conversations when you’ve been out of the office.
Example prompt:
“Review my Teams messages with [person or team name] from the last two weeks and give me a list of every topic we discussed, with a link to each conversation thread.”
Cowork will return a comprehensive list with clickable links that take you directly back to the relevant message thread in Teams.
In side-by-side testing by Teal, Chat returned about 7 topics from a two-week conversation. Cowork returned more than 20 because it spent the time to reason through the data rather than returning the fastest response.
How Do Custom Cowork Skills Work?
A skill in Cowork is a saved set of instructions for a repeatable task. Instead of retyping a complex prompt every time, you describe the task once, Cowork converts it into a skill file, and that file lives in your OneDrive. The next time you run a related task, Cowork references the skill automatically.
To build a skill:
- Complete a task in Cowork and confirm the output looks right.
- In the same Cowork thread, type, “Build a skill based on what I just asked you to do.”
- Cowork generates a skill file and saves it to your OneDrive.
- Future tasks that match the skill’s instructions will reference it automatically.
Microsoft documents 13 built-in skills that come with Cowork out of the box — including document creation, email, calendar management, and Teams messaging. Custom skills extend that by letting your team encode the specific processes, formats, and preferences that are unique to how you work.
What You Need to Do Before Turning Cowork On
Cowork is available to organizations with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Before your team starts using it, you should do three things:
1. Set AI rules for your organization.
Decide what data employees are allowed to put into AI tools, which platforms are approved, and how AI-generated content should be reviewed before it goes to clients or leadership.
2. Identify an internal champion.
Someone needs to own Cowork adoption in your organization. Not as an IT project, but as a workflow initiative. This person tests use cases, collects feedback, and helps the team change their habits. Because AI tools that don’t have a champion tend to get licensed and left unused.
3. Check your data access settings.
Copilot has access to your Microsoft 365 environment, things like emails, Teams messages, files, and calendar. Before you turn it on, confirm who has access to what data. Cowork, or even Copilot Chat, will surface content that users may not have realized they could see, which is a data governance issue if you haven’t thought through it first. Microsoft’s AI adoption toolkit walks through this in detail.
Get More Work Done with Cowork
If your organization already has M365 Copilot licenses, but isn’t using Cowork yet, the gap between what you’re paying for and what you’re getting from it is growing. Teal can help you identify the right use cases, build a rollout plan, and make sure your data access settings are in order before you go live.
