Copilot Cowork Walkthrough Guide

Having got back from MVP Summit (aka the NDA event) at the end of March and seeing the work Microsoft have been doing around the Anthropic powered Copilot CoWork experience in M365 Copilot, I wanted to blog my first experience now that this is in Public Preview as part of the Frontier Programme.

Enabling CoWork

In order to enable Cowork in your M365 tenant, your IT team will have needed to have enabled a few things. There’s a full instruction guide here, but in short here’s what must be enabled:

• Enable Anthropic models as a sub-processor in M365 Admin Settings (if in EU/UK)
• Ensure your M365 tenant is signed up for the M365 Copilot preview (Frontier)
• Ensure you have M365 Copilot Licenses assigned to users
• Allocate / assign or make available the CoWork Agent from the Agent Store to users/select users

How to add the Copilot CoWork Agent

To get started with Copilot Cowork (assuming the above pre-reqs have been completed),

1. Head over to the M365 Copilot App or https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat and go to Agents in the navigation pane.
2. Click on “All Agents”
3. Start typing CoWork in the search box – you should see Copilot CoWork in the results
4. Select the Agent and add it.

How to use Copilot CoWork

When you first open CoWork, you will be presented with a familiar looking start layout with a few suggested starter prompts. You can choose from two AI models (Claude 4.6 or Opus 4.6) or just use the default Auto Mode.

For my first Cowork experience, I’m going to ask Cowork to do some research for me in a similar way I would use the Researcher Agent. I used the template provided and then customised the prompt with details of my company. You can see the prompt below.

You then click go as you would normally and Copilot CoWork starts doing its thing. You’ll see the familiar progress status which runs below your initial prompt. There’s also a handy details side pane to the right of the screen which you can collapse and expand.

As Cowork does it’s thing, you can add / ask it to do more things inline and it will queue these tasks up. For example, if you know that when it’s finished it’s work you will also need a presentation or word doc prepared, or an email drafted with the key findings, you can go ahead and ask Cowork to do this without waiting for it to finish the last task.

You simply keep adding tasks and instructions and CoWork takes care or it. If it needs any input from you, it will ask.

Note: To give CoWork extra context, you can include files with your message. To do this, you can simply drag and drop files, images etc., directly onto the chat input.

What does CoWork produce?

In this example (this was quite a simple request), Cowork has provided me with a report which you can see inline as well as some core content in the form of a Word Doc, MarkDown Report (MD) and financial analysis report in Excel. I then move further and request presentation deck and emails which CoWork seems to handle with ease.

From here I can chose to open these or can carry on asking Cowork to do more. Here, I have just opened the word document. Already I can see that this is much more “professional looking” than what Copilot would have typically created in word for me – these Anthropic Models Microsoft are using (in their controlled environment) are really good at document creation. A sample is shown below – but in my example, the report generated by Copilot is several pages.

The wider mark-down report Copilot has generated is more detailed providing key points and facts. The Word Doc is a exec summary.

The Mark Down File (which is also the core response) provides a really clear and strcutured report. In my example, this broke down our competitors (what they do, financials etc), core vendors we work with (Cisco and Microsoft) and then provided. There’s an example below – showing the typical depth you would expect from a “Researcher” type output.

Putting CoWork to work

I am pleased with the output but now I need to do some more – this is where CoWork really starts to shine. I’m asking Cowork to create me a presentation deck and then an email introducing it to the team. You will see I have stacked up two requests here.

As Copilot works – you see it adding content to the output folder and can see it working in parallel.

CoWork has created me a set of “project files”, a set of email templates for me and a PowerPoint presentation which is really compete. I could have passed a template for it to use but in this example I just it do it’s thing. let’s take a quick look.

The example below is an example of a fictious business and marketing plan.

What else can CoWork do?

This is just the beginning of what is starting to shape the full set of deliverables from Microsoft’s initial vision for M365 Copilot. Microsoft’s approach is very much multi-modal, leveraging the best capabilities from the leading AI Model Providers (Open AI and Anthropic), while they are (in the background) perfecting their own models which we expect to start showing up later this year.

Note: M365 Copilot CoWork is in preview, so expect huge updates quickly as well as few hiccups on the way. 

Cowork (like Claude) also supports the adding of skills to extend it's capabilty, but for now expect full integration across the M365 Suite. It can write emails, create complex documents, conduct research, and run a project - for example notes->write-up->commercial XLS -> Report -> PowerPoint -> email comms in a single request. 

What about CoWork Skills?

At time of writing, Cowork has 13 built-in skills. These are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Email, Scheduling, Calendar Management, Meetings, Daily Briefing, Enterprise Search, Communications, Deep Research, and Adaptive Cards.

Users can create up to 20 custom skills by placing a SKILL.md file in a subfolder of /Documents/Cowork/Skills/ in OneDrive. Each file contains a YAML frontmatter block with the skill name, description, and instructions. Copilot Cowork automatically discovers these skills at the start of each conversation, allowing you to extend its capabilities for organization-specific workflows.

My Initial Review of CoWork

Based on my initial first few runs with CoWork, my experiences to date is that:

1. PowerPoint presentations and Word documents that CoWork creates are far superior to what we have seen seen in Copilot to date. They are visually appealing, retain retain accuracy across apps and can support company branding. 
2. CoWork is also good at helping me organise my inbox. In my testing, it was good at finding spam emails and newsletters, and offers to delete them, one at a time, or in bulk. 
3. You don’t need to be a super prompter. Just think about what you what and work with CoWork as you go. All project files are stored in OneDrive for you. You can also queue up a second, third, forth commands while it is working and don’t have to wait for it to finish the first. 
4. CoWork sessions keep going even if you turn your device off (unless it needs your approval to do something).  
5. Data sensitivity and classifications that are applied to files used by Cowork are also preserved in it’s output.