Microsoft's Copilot super app bundles chat, code, agents — SkimNews
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- Microsoft officially unveiled its redesigned Copilot "super app" bundling AI chat, coding, and agents into a single interface organized around three tabs: Home, Code, and Autopilot.
- Microsoft rebranded Scout — the AI personal assistant it first showed at Build — as Autopilot, a cloud-based agent with its own identity, memory, computer instance, and workspace built on Microsoft IQ that can be @mentioned like a colleague in Teams and Outlook.
- The new Code tab, powered by the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandboxed environment within the user's tenant and lets non-developers build apps, trackers, dashboards, and automations to share as cloud-hosted internal apps.
- Microsoft is shifting to usage-based billing for Cowork, Code, and Autopilot, with long-running agentic capabilities and models like Astra and Fable billed by consumption rather than a flat per-user license.
- Microsoft introduced FinOps for AI to let IT admins track AI spend and prevent runaway agentic usage costs, while its auto model picker matches tasks to underlying models inside the standard Copilot license.
- Home and Code roll out via Microsoft's Frontier program "in the coming weeks"; Autopilot enters private preview later this month; Code also goes to preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
- Satya Nadella called Copilot "a new OS for work," and Microsoft's Jared Spataro said "just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era."
Why it matters: Microsoft is decoupling Copilot pricing from per-seat licenses and tying it to actual employee usage of agents and Code, meaning adopters face variable AI bills tied to how actively staff use Autopilot and build with Code. The article concedes Copilot has "failed in the consumer space compared to Claude or ChatGPT," making the enterprise-grade, tenant-resident, usage-metered approach Microsoft's clearest path to closing ground on Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
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