4 min readNew DelhiSep 28, 2026 12:11 PM IST
Microsoft is looking to sell Copilot to businesses again by revamping its AI offering into a super app that brings together features previously available separately, including AI coding tools and an always-on AI agent.
The Windows-maker has rebranded its personal AI assistant ‘Scout’, launched at its annual Build conference earlier this year, as Autopilot. The redesigned app unveiled on Friday, September 25, bundles three AI capabilities (chat, coding, and agents) into a single interface.
Accordingly, the default Copilot app layout has three tabs: ‘Home’, ‘Code’, and ‘Autopilot’.
While Microsoft has made changes to the Copilot several times in the past, this is the first time the app will offer consumer-focused and commercial AI capabilities in one place. So far, the Copilot app has failed to make a splash in the crowded AI app market dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
However, the company is looking to replicate Office 365’s success by positioning Copilot as an AI productivity tool for its core enterprise user base. “Just as Office defined work for the PC era, the new Copilot is built to define it for the AI era,” Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at work at Microsoft, was quoted as saying by The Verge.
The new Home and Code tabs in Copilot will be rolled out in the coming weeks to those who are part of Microsoft’s Frontier programme for early access AI features. Autopilot will be rolled out in private preview later this month, while the Code tab will also be in preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro subscribers later this year.
In terms of pricing, the Cowork, Code, and Autopilot parts of this new Copilot app will have usage-based billing. Users who have purchased a regular Copilot license will have access to Copilot in Chat, and in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
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New Copilot features
The Home tab in the redesigned Copilot app will offer features previously available in Copilot Chat and Cowork. Under this section, Microsoft is also planning to launch a new ‘Today’ feature that will serve as a personalised dashboard for important emails, meeting requests, Teams threads, and more.
The super app’s Code tool will let users generate an app, tracker, dashboard, etc, and share the results with colleagues as cloud-hosted internal apps. The AI coding tool is powered by the same models underpinning GitHub Copilot and will run in a sandboxed environment as a security precaution.
What is Autopilot?
Previously referred to as Scout, which was only available as a desktop app, the rebranded AI assistant has been reworked to function as a ‘digital teammate’ that can keep running even when users are asleep.
Similar to other always-on AI agents, Autopilot operates within its own cloud computer instance and can be used for tasks like watch Teams channels, run recurring work tasks, or handle follow-ups. What makes Autopilot stand out from the other crop of AI agents is its enterprise-grade capabilities for businesses that rely on its Office and identity management suites.
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“Autopilot lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer, and workspace, and it’s built on Microsoft IQ so it understands how your organization actually works. It shows up where people already work — Teams, Outlook, chats, channels, and documents — so you can @mention it like a colleague, with permissions, audit, and governance behind it,” Spataro said.
Under the hood, Autopilot appears to be built on top of several AI models with an auto model picker designed to route each task to a specific model.
