Every Copilot you've used so far is a drafting machine. It writes the email; you send it. It proposes the agenda; you schedule the meeting. Cowork breaks that contract: it's the first Microsoft 365 Copilot that carries out the task — sends the email, creates the documents, books the meeting, searches the org — and shows you its homework in a folder when it's done.
That's a genuinely different tool, and it deserves a genuinely different mental model. Here it is.
Acts, not suggests
Standard Copilot Chat is a conversation that ends in text. Cowork is a conversation that ends in outcomes: files in an output folder, invites on calendars, mail in other people's inboxes. The suggested starters tell you exactly what Microsoft thinks it's for — Catch me up, Organize my inbox, Organize my week, Prep for a meeting, Plan an event, Prepare for my 1:1, Research a company. Notice the pattern: multi-step chores with a clear deliverable, not one-shot questions.
It also takes serious input — up to 250,000 characters per prompt, plus attached files from your device or cloud and your work context. You can hand it the entire vendor contract and the full email thread, not a summary of either.
Getting access (and the gotcha)
Cowork ships only through the Frontier preview program. Your admin enrolls the tenant — and here's the trap that burns half the admins who try: if Cowork isn't visible in the admin center's Agent management, it's usually because the admin account itself isn't enrolled in Frontier (Copilot → Settings → Frontier). Enroll the account, and the management surface appears. If you're a user waiting on access, send your admin exactly that sentence.