Microsoft Copilot Overhaul Adds Home Hub, Code Builder and Autopilot Agent

Microsoft on September 25, 2026 introduced the new Copilot, a redesign of its work assistant built around three capabilities: Home with Office in Copilot, the Code app builder and Autopilot, a persistent agent. The announcement also brings a public preview of the Copilot Managed Runtime hosting platform, expanded business-data grounding and a revised pricing model with new FinOps controls.

The new capabilities are rolling out through Microsoft’s Frontier program, with features arriving continuously. Home and Code will start rolling out to Frontier users in the coming weeks, Microsoft said.

Home and Office in Copilot

Home is the new starting point in the Copilot app, where the Chat and Cowork modes come together. Users can review recent activity, get suggestions on what Copilot can help with and resume work where they left off. Chat is positioned for quick questions, lookups and drafts, while Cowork handles work the user delegates end-to-end; Microsoft’s examples include an RFP response, a launch kit, a customer briefing and a financial close package. Microsoft says a coming update will let users simply state what they need, with Copilot routing the work to Chat, Cowork or Code.

Office in Copilot builds Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly into the experience. From Home, a user can ask Copilot to draft a launch brief, model a budget or build a deck, and Copilot creates or updates a real, editable document, workbook or presentation live for the whole team; an @mentioned teammate’s edits appear as they make them. Microsoft says PowerPoint now keeps decks on-brand automatically, Excel shows exactly what changed and why when Copilot or a collaborator edits, and Copilot recommends charts for the data. A Skills feature brings role-specific expertise, such as financial skills in Excel and legal skills in Word, into the Microsoft 365 apps through reusable, role-specific workflows.

Code and Copilot Managed Runtime

Code lets a user describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in natural language, and Copilot chooses an approach and builds it, from persistent desktop widgets and interactive dashboards to cloud-hosted internal apps that can be shared with a team. Microsoft says Code is powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandboxed environment, can be hosted within the customer’s tenant and is grounded in work context through Microsoft IQ. Code is rolling out to Frontier at the end of the month, with broad availability in the coming weeks, and will reach preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later in 2026.

Alongside Code, Microsoft placed Copilot Managed Runtime into public preview. It is enterprise-grade hosting that runs code inside the Microsoft 365 tenant boundary under IT governance, with sharing, live data connections and access from anywhere. The runtime already powers apps built in Copilot Cowork, Copilot Code and Copilot Studio, and Microsoft is opening it to third-party tooling and professional developers through an SDK and command-line interface that support project scaffolding, data connections and typed TypeScript services. Microsoft Entra identity provides authorized access, organizational policies govern the connectors, data and endpoints an app can use, and version and source control are Git-backed. Hosted apps appear in a new Apps experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center, giving administrators one inventory for access, usage, health and policy regardless of where each app was built.

Lan Roche, Head of Global Partnerships at Lovable, said in Microsoft’s Managed Runtime post: “With the Copilot Managed Runtime SDK, an app made with Lovable can now run inside your Microsoft tenant, the same way everything else does: same sign-in, same policies, same app inventory.”

Autopilot and Business Context

Autopilot, previously called Scout, is a persistent agent that a user configures with a name, a role and a goal. Microsoft says it watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks projects back up days later without a prompt, and that it can set up and manage a full supplier review process, from building the schedule and workback plan to handling prep, meetings, follow-ups and outreach to stakeholders. Autopilot is cloud-hosted and lives in the tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. It appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents, where users can @mention it like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance behind it. Autopilot is expanding to private preview at the end of the month.

Copilot’s grounding in Microsoft IQ is also expanding. Fabric IQ brings context from organizational data into Copilot, including what Microsoft says are more than 20 million semantic models in Power BI; it is generally available in Chat and Cowork now, with Code integration coming through Frontier soon. Over the next month, a public preview will ground Copilot in data and workflows from Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, so a salesperson’s proposal can incorporate deal history and support tickets without switching apps, in Microsoft’s example. A new plugin registry brings Microsoft, partner and custom-built plugins into one catalog; it is rolling out now and will be generally available across surfaces in the coming weeks, with IT approving and managing plugins centrally and developers publishing once.

Pricing and FinOps Controls

In Microsoft’s post on the Copilot pricing model, the company said everyday AI remains covered by the per-user subscription license with no changes to existing value. The Auto setting in the model picker weighs accuracy, speed and cost on each request to route work to the model best suited for the job, and Microsoft says GPT-5.6 and Sonnet 5 are included, with Opus 5 planned under limits. Microsoft said fair-use limits are set so the vast majority of users never reach one; the heaviest users receive a warning and then a choice of switching to Auto at no additional cost or moving to credits.

Agentic work runs instead on usage-based billing with Copilot Credits: Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new agentic experiences in apps such as SharePoint, and frontier models such as Fable and Astra. The subscription license is required to access those capabilities. Microsoft said both license types run on models from multiple labs, with OpenAI and Anthropic as the current providers and more labs and open-weight models planned.

For enterprise customers, usage-based services stay off until an administrator creates a spending policy in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and nothing is billed before that point. Administrators can set budgets at the tenant and group level, user-level caps within group policies, and alerts at spend thresholds, and can manage policies programmatically through the Microsoft Graph API. Cost management in Agent 365 is expanding beyond Cowork and the Work IQ APIs to include Code and Copilot Managed Runtime, with support for Copilot Studio agents planned for October 2026, and end users can view credit usage, remaining balances and usage history directly in Microsoft Copilot.

Upcoming Previews

Microsoft also dated two coming previews. A proactive command center named Today, spanning mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks, enters private preview in October 2026 inside Copilot and will come to Outlook and Teams as well; Microsoft says it will show what the user missed, what needs attention and what can wait, with drafts and schedule changes already prepared. Invoking @Copilot in Teams gives a team the shared context and permissions of the channel, group chat or meeting, and Microsoft says Copilot can offer to prepare a cross-functional review with dependencies, owners, open questions and decisions. The @Copilot capability enters private preview in Teams by the end of the month.

Microsoft Ignite, where the company says it will share more Copilot news, runs November 17–20, 2026, in San Francisco and online.