The New Microsoft Copilot: What Home, Code and Autopilot Mean for Your Tenant

Microsoft just rebuilt Copilot. This isn't another button in Word. The new Microsoft Copilot is an app with three parts: Home, Code and Autopilot. Each one changes what your users can do in your tenant, and what you have to govern as an admin. In this post, I'll go through what's new, when it reaches your tenant, and what I would prepare now.

What's new in the new Microsoft Copilot?

On September 25, 2026, Jared Spataro announced the new Copilot on the Official Microsoft Blog. The Copilot app now has three new capabilities. Let's take a closer look at each of them.

Home: Chat, Cowork and Office in one place

Home is the new starting point in Copilot. It brings Chat and Cowork together. Chat is for quick questions, lookups and drafts. Cowork is for work you hand off: you define the task, and it runs end-to-end until it returns a finished result, like an RFP response or a customer briefing. Microsoft also says that soon you won't have to pick a mode at all. Copilot will send the work to Chat, Cowork or Code, depending on what fits the job.

The part your users will notice first is Office in Copilot. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are now built into Copilot itself. When you ask Copilot to build a deck or model a budget, it creates a real, editable file that your whole team can open. You can @mention a teammate, and their edits stay in sync between Copilot and the regular Office apps.

Code: everyone becomes a builder

Code is the one I find most interesting. You describe an app, tracker, dashboard, automation or workflow in plain language, and Copilot builds it. The result can be a desktop widget, an interactive dashboard or a cloud-hosted internal app that you share with your team.

Code uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot. It runs in a sandbox and can be hosted within your tenant. Your developers keep using GitHub Copilot for their daily work. Microsoft's pitch is that apps become a new unit of knowledge work, next to the document, the spreadsheet and the deck.

To host all those apps, Microsoft is introducing Copilot Managed Runtime. Think of it as a hosting environment inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, where these small apps run, governed by IT. Apps built in Cowork, Code and Copilot Studio all run on it, and Microsoft is opening it up to third-party and pro-code developers too. Managed Runtime is in preview now.

Autopilot: a colleague who never logs off

Autopilot is what Microsoft used to call Scout. You give it a name, a role and a goal, and it goes to work. It watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks a project back up days later, without waiting for a prompt. Microsoft's example: it can run a full supplier review, from building the schedule to chasing stakeholders for updates.

Autopilot runs in the cloud and lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace. It shows up in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents, and you can @mention it like a colleague. According to Microsoft, "permissions, audit and governance" sit behind it.

When does it reach your tenant?

Not everything lands at the same time. According to the announcement:

• Home: starts rolling out in the Frontier Program in the coming weeks.
• Code: rolls out to Frontier at the end of September, with broad availability in the coming weeks. It will be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
• Autopilot: expands to private preview at the end of September.
• Copilot Managed Runtime: in preview now.
• @Copilot in Teams: private preview in Teams by the end of September. It gives the whole team the shared context and permissions of the channel, group chat or meeting.
• Today: a proactive overview of your mail, calendar, Teams and tasks inside Home. It goes into private preview in October.

It's good to know that Copilot also gets more business context. Fabric IQ, which brings in your Power BI semantic models, is generally available in Chat and Cowork today. Grounding in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data rolls out in public preview over the next month.

Why should you care as an admin?

The truth is, this announcement adds three new things you have to govern.

Code turns every user into a potential app builder. Microsoft puts guardrails in place with the sandbox and Managed Runtime, but you still decide who can build, who can share and which data those apps can reach.

Autopilot is a non-human identity in your tenant that reads Teams channels and contacts people on its own. Treat it like you would a new service account with a mailbox: know who owns it, what it can access and where its activity is logged. I wrote more about that in what Agent 365 changes for IT.

Plugins get easier to control, and this is the good news. A new plugin registry brings Microsoft, partner and custom-built plugins together in one catalog, and IT can approve and manage them centrally. It's rolling out now, with general availability across surfaces in the coming weeks.

And then there's the price. Chat and Copilot in the Office apps stay on your per-user licence. Cowork, Code and Autopilot run on usage-based billing with Copilot Credits. That's a big enough change for its own post, so I wrote a separate blog about the new Copilot pricing model.

What would I do now?

If you're already in the Frontier Program, Home and Code will show up in your tenant first. Start with a small test group, and decide before the rollout who can build and share apps with Code.

If you're not in Frontier yet, I explained how to join in How to join the Microsoft Copilot Frontier Program. Do note that Frontier features are previews, so keep them to a pilot group and don't roll them out to production users straight away.

If Autopilot interests you, prepare the governance conversation now rather than when a user asks for it. Who can create an Autopilot, what can it see, and who reviews what it does?

Final thoughts

Personally? I think Code is the biggest change here, and also the one that worries me most. We've seen what happens when everyone can build. Remember all the Power Apps and flows that nobody owned anymore once their maker left? Managed Runtime and the plugin registry show that Microsoft knows this. But the settings only help if you configure them before your users start building.

Autopilot is impressive on paper. An agent that keeps working while you sleep is also an agent that works while nobody is watching. I'll test it in my own tenant before I recommend it to anyone.

Which part of the new Copilot are you most curious about: Home, Code or Autopilot? Let me know in the comments!

Learn more

• Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot - The Official Microsoft Blog
• Evolution of the Copilot pricing model | Microsoft Community Hub
• Get started with the Microsoft Copilot Frontier Program - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn
• Introducing Microsoft Scout: Your always-on personal agent | AI at Work Blog