Microsoft rebuilds Copilot with autonomous AI agents

Microsoft has rebuilt its AI assistant Copilot around three new parts: Home, Code and Autopilot.

Home brings together chat, tasks Copilot handles for the user, and work with Office documents in one place. Code makes it possible to describe a program or a workflow in plain language, which Copilot then builds. Autopilot is a new kind of AI employee that can keep working for days without receiving new messages; it keeps track of the context of the task and stores its memory somewhere outside the AI model itself.

An AI chief of staff for everyone

CEO Satya Nadella compared Autopilot to giving every employee in Microsoft 365 their own AI chief of staff. In practice, Autopilot appears as a colleague inside Teams while it handles ongoing tasks in the background.

Nadella credited the company OpenClaw with figuring out how to build AI agents that can work autonomously over long periods. Parts of OpenClaw's open source code, meaning free and publicly available source code, are behind Autopilot. Microsoft has more than 30 million paying business customers for Copilot.

Nadella called AI agents a potentially huge business opportunity for Microsoft, possibly the biggest in the company's history, and suggested that the market for agents could become far larger than the current market for cloud services.

What it means for you

If you already use Copilot at work, you may soon get help with tasks that keep running on their own in the background, without you having to follow up all the time. You can start thinking of Copilot as a colleague you can give a bigger task to and sit back while it keeps working in Teams. This makes the most sense for tasks that stretch over several days that you would normally have to keep track of yourself.