The difference in one line

Copilot Chat is a conversation. Copilot Cowork is a delegated job. With Chat, you ask and it answers. With Cowork, you describe an outcome — "compare these two supplier lists and tell me what changed" — and it turns that into a plan, works through the steps in the background, and checks in at points where you confirm, adjust, or pause. It runs in a secure cloud environment, so a long task keeps going even when your laptop is closed.

What it can reach

Cowork works across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and SharePoint, and grounds its work in your own emails, meetings, files, and messages. It ships with thirteen built-in skills covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, email, scheduling, calendar management, meetings, a daily briefing, enterprise search, communications, deep research, and adaptive cards. In Microsoft's own examples, one team compared nearly four thousand files in work that would have taken weeks, and a sales lead handed over a stalled pipeline and got back a ranked list of at-risk deals.

What's actually worth handing off

Skip the headline demos and think about your own week. The realistic wins are the multi-step jobs you currently babysit:

Combining many documents into one view. A folder of status reports, meeting notes, or proposals that all need the same summary treatment. Cowork can work through them and hand you one combined result.

Comparing versions. Two spreadsheets, two contracts, two drafts — Cowork can list what changed so you're not reading line by line.

Assembling a first draft from your own material. Point it at the notes, figures, and emails behind a report and let it build the skeleton you'll then refine.

The catch: you need the licence

Cowork needs a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licence — it is not part of free Copilot Chat. If your organisation hasn't bought that licence, you won't see it. This sits alongside a related change that confused many people earlier this year: the in-app Copilot button inside Word and Excel now also requires that paid licence, which is why it quietly disappeared for some users. Free Copilot Chat on the web still works for everyone; the in-app and Cowork experiences are the paid tier.

How to try it without risk

If you have access, don't make a live, high-stakes job your first test. Give Cowork something real but recoverable — a set of documents to compare, a folder to summarise, a draft to assemble from notes — and watch what it does at each checkpoint. Ask it to lay out its plan before it starts, and keep approval over anything that sends or changes something.

I want to hand off a multi-step task. Here's the outcome I need: [Plain-English goal, e.g. "Go through the 12 status reports in this SharePoint folder and give me one combined summary: what's on track, what's slipped, and which three items need a decision from me this week."] Before you start, list the steps you'll take and tell me where you'll pause for my approval. Don't send or change anything until I confirm.
💡 This week's action

Find out whether your workplace has Microsoft 365 Copilot licences — ask IT, or check whether the Copilot pane shows up inside your Word and Excel. If it does, run one low-risk Cowork task using the prompt above and watch the checkpoints. If it doesn't, you've still learned something useful: the in-app features sit behind a paid licence, and free Copilot Chat on the web is your no-cost option.