Microsoft launches Copilot super app with chat, coding and Autopilot agent tabs

Microsoft has officially unveiled the redesigned Copilot app it previewed last month, folding chat, coding and autonomous agents into a single interface that the company describes as a "super app." According to The Verge, the launch comes with a rebrand: Scout, the AI assistant Microsoft showed off at Build earlier this year, is now called Autopilot.

Three tabs: Home, Code and Autopilot

The app is organised around three tabs. Home merges Copilot Chat and Cowork into the default landing view, and Microsoft plans to add a "Today" section there that acts as a personalised dashboard for important email, meeting requests and Teams threads. Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer of AI at work, told The Verge that Home is meant to help people get their bearings, review recent activity and pick up work where they left off.

Code is the unexpected piece for an app aimed at office workers. It lets anyone build an app, tracker, dashboard or automation and share the result with colleagues as cloud-hosted internal tools. Spataro says it uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot, runs in a sandboxed environment and can be hosted securely inside a customer's tenant.

Autopilot, meanwhile, is what Spataro calls a "digital teammate." Previously a desktop app under the Scout name, it now has a cloud counterpart that keeps running while the user is offline or asleep. Like other AI agents, it gets its own cloud computer instance and can be assigned jobs such as monitoring Teams channels, running recurring work tasks or handling follow-ups.

Built for the enterprise, not the consumer chat race

What separates Autopilot from many rival agents, The Verge reports, is its enterprise focus. It lives inside the customer's tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, is built on what Microsoft calls Microsoft IQ to understand how an organisation works, and appears in Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents where it can be @mentioned like a colleague — with permissions, auditing and governance attached.

Usage-based billing for the agentic parts

The commercial model is changing too. A standard user subscription license covers Copilot in chat as well as in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. But the Cowork, Code and Autopilot features are billed on consumption: long-running agent activity and use of models Microsoft refers to as Astra and Fable will be metered. An automatic model picker matches each task to a model, and IT administrators are expected to keep spending in check using Microsoft's new FinOps for AI tooling.

A staggered rollout

According to The Verge, the Home and Code tabs will reach Microsoft's Frontier early-access program in the coming weeks, Autopilot enters private preview later this month, and Code will be available in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year. The launch builds on last month's merger of the separate consumer and commercial Copilot apps, and follows leadership changes that for the first time put a single executive in charge of Copilot.

Why it matters

Microsoft is framing this as a generational bet. "Just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era," Spataro said — a comparison that positions Copilot not as a chatbot feature but as the next default work platform. That ambition faces steep odds: The Verge notes Copilot has lost ground to Claude and ChatGPT with consumers, and Microsoft trails Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and now Meta in the broader AI race, while the new app is not aimed at competitors like Muse. The company is instead targeting its commercial base, betting that agents running inside corporate tenants — governed, audited and metered — will be what businesses actually pay for. If agentic work becomes central to office software, the app that hosts, governs and bills for those agents becomes the platform layer for the AI era. That is the Office-scale prize Microsoft is chasing, and this release is its clearest attempt yet to claim it.