Microsoft's New Copilot Adds Autopilot, an AI Colleague That Works While You Sleep. Here Is What It Does and What It Will Cost

On 25 September Microsoft rebuilt Copilot around three things: a single Home screen where chat and delegated work sit together, a Code tab that builds small apps from a plain description, and Autopilot, an AI agent that lives inside your company with its own identity and keeps working when nobody is watching it. It is the clearest sign yet that the big office-software vendors now sell AI in two forms: a chat box your staff use, and a digital worker you hand jobs to. The same day, Microsoft split the bill the same way. This article explains what each part does, what it will cost, which settings to check before Autopilot reaches your company, and what we have learned from running AI that never switches off.

What Microsoft Launched on 25 September

The announcement came from Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing officer for AI at Work, on the official Microsoft blog. None of it is generally available yet. It is rolling out first through Frontier, Microsoft's early-access programme, so treat the dates below as Microsoft's plan rather than something you can switch on today.

This is a big bet for Microsoft. In its July earnings release the company said Microsoft 365 Copilot had passed 30 million paid seats. The new app is how it plans to turn those seats into something people use all day, rather than a button they press now and then.

Autopilot Is a Colleague, Not a Smarter Chat Box

Autopilot is the part worth paying attention to. Microsoft first showed it in June under the name Scout. What has changed is that it now sits at the centre of the product. In Microsoft's words, it is "a persistent, proactive and personal agent that keeps working even when you're not."

In practice, based on what Microsoft has described:

• It has its own identity. Autopilot "lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace." Your IT team manages it as a separate account, not as a borrowed login shared by the whole office.
• It does not wait to be asked. It watches channels, follows up on threads, runs recurring work and picks a project back up days later. Microsoft's example is running a full supplier review: building the schedule, preparing the meetings and chasing people for updates.
• It works where your staff already work. You @mention it in Teams, Outlook, chats and documents the way you would mention a colleague.
• It runs in the cloud. It keeps going when your laptop is shut, which is the whole point, and also the reason it needs rules.

That is a different kind of product from a chatbot. A chatbot waits for a question and stops when it has answered. Autopilot is closer to a junior hire who has a desk, an inbox and a to-do list, and who never goes home. Jacob Andreou, the Microsoft executive in charge of Copilot, put the trade-off plainly, as reported by GeekWire: the autonomy that makes a long-running agent useful is "the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin."

Two Kinds of AI, Two Ways of Paying

Alongside the launch, Microsoft published a post by Nicole Herskowitz explaining how Copilot pricing is changing. The idea is simple, and we think other vendors will copy it.

• Everyday AI is a fixed monthly fee. Chat, and Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, stay on the per-user licence. Microsoft 365 Copilot is listed at $30 per user a month, paid yearly. There are fair-use limits, and Microsoft says most people will never reach them.
• Handed-off work is metered. Cowork, Code, Autopilot and the most powerful models run on usage-based billing, paid in Copilot Credits. The more work an agent does, the more it costs.
• You need both. Microsoft says usage-based billing "builds on" the per-user licence, "which is required to access these capabilities." Autopilot is not a way to skip the seat.

Microsoft compares it to a plug-in hybrid car: the licence is the battery that covers most daily driving, and credits are the fuel tank for the longer trips. On price, Microsoft's Copilot Studio page lists a prepaid pack of 25,000 Copilot Credits for $200 a month, and says pre-purchase plans can save up to 20%. What Microsoft has not published is how many credits an Autopilot uses in an hour or a day. That depends on the model it uses, how long it runs and which tools it calls. Microsoft points customers to its Copilot Credit Estimator and to a /cost command that shows the approximate credits a Cowork task has used so far.

An always-on agent is a hire, not a feature. Give it a job description, a budget and a manager before you give it a login.

Three Settings to Check Before Autopilot Reaches Your Company

The good news is the default. Microsoft says that for enterprise customers, usage-based services "stay off until an admin creates a spending policy," and nothing is billed before that. The controls are in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot, then Cost management. Reading Microsoft's admin documentation, updated on 25 September, three details matter more than the rest:

• "Auto-apply new services" is on by default. A spending policy you create today for Cowork will automatically cover new agents and services when Microsoft adds them. That is convenient, but it means Autopilot could join an existing budget without anyone reviewing it. If you want to decide about Autopilot on its own terms, turn this setting off.
• The monthly limit can be left open. When you set up the default policy, "Don't limit monthly spending" is one of the two choices. The per-user limit is optional too, although Microsoft itself recommends setting one "to prevent runaway spending of Copilot Credits by one individual user." Set both.
• A prepaid pack is not a ceiling. Microsoft's documentation says that when prepaid credits run out, "usage automatically continues on a pay-as-you-go basis." A pack lowers the price per credit. Only a spending limit stops the spending. And, according to Copilot Studio's licensing page, unused pack credits do not carry over to the next month.

Two smaller points are worth knowing. The cost dashboard refreshes every few hours rather than live, so a busy agent can run ahead of your view of it. And when a user hits their limit, they lose access to these services until credits reset on the first of the month. If a critical process depends on an agent, give it a budget that fits the work, not one that switches it off halfway through the month.

What Code Is Good For, and Where It Should Stop

Code is the part most likely to excite a busy manager. Describe a dashboard for this week's orders, a tracker for supplier deliveries or a widget that shows overdue invoices, and Copilot builds it and hosts it inside your company's Microsoft 365 account. Microsoft says it runs in a sandbox and uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot. For small internal tools that live for a few months, this is a real saving on time and on developer cost.

Our opinion is that it should stop at the edge of anything your business has to prove later. A dashboard that reads your sales figures is a good use. A home-made app that becomes the place where you record those sales is not. The moment a tool holds money, stock or tax records, you need things a generated app will not give you by default:

• Records that cannot be quietly changed. An auditor or a tax authority will ask who changed what, and when.
• Rules that match the law. Tax rates, invoice formats and e-invoicing requirements change, and someone has to keep up with them.
• An owner. An app built by one enthusiastic employee becomes a problem the day that person leaves.

That is why we built IO Snack Accounts as a proper double-entry ledger: posted entries are reversed rather than edited, every action is audited, and invoices go to Pakistan's FBR or Saudi Arabia's ZATCA from inside the ledger through the Tax Filing add-on. That is not something to rebuild in a spreadsheet or a generated app. Use Code to look at your numbers. Keep the numbers themselves somewhere that is built to keep them.

What Running AI That Never Switches Off Has Taught Us

We run always-on AI ourselves. AI Cam is an AI watchman that watches a business's cameras around the clock and decides what is worth telling the owner about. It is a much narrower job than Autopilot's, but the lessons carry across to any agent that works while you are not looking:

• A narrow job beats a clever one. "Watch these cameras and tell me about anything that matters" works. "Help run the business" does not. Give Autopilot a single, clear goal before you give it a broad one.
• Check before it acts. In AI Cam, every alert is checked before it reaches the owner. For Autopilot, Microsoft says sensitive actions can require a person's sign-off. Use that for anything that sends money, signs up a supplier or emails a customer.
• Keep a written record of everything. Every event AI Cam handles is logged. An agent's log is how you find out why it did something, and how you prove what it did. Microsoft says Autopilot comes with audit and governance. Read the log in the first weeks, not only when something goes wrong.
• Silence is not the same as success. An always-on system that has stopped working often looks exactly like one that has nothing to report. Decide in advance what a normal week of output looks like, and check against it.
• Limit the noise as well as the spend. AI Cam has cooldown windows so the same alert does not arrive twenty times. An agent that follows up on every thread can annoy your staff and your suppliers just as quickly.

Should a Small Business Sign Up Now?

For most small businesses, not yet, and that is fine. Autopilot is a private preview. Code and Home are reaching Frontier customers first. The rate that matters most, the credits an agent uses in a normal working day, is not published. The companies in the first wave will be paying to find out what these agents actually cost and what they are actually good at.

There is still useful work to do now:

• Write the job description. Pick one recurring task, such as chasing supplier quotes or preparing a weekly sales summary, and write down the goal, the inputs, what a finished result looks like and who checks it. That document is what you will give Autopilot, or any other agent.
• Decide your monthly ceiling in advance. Pick the number before the first bill arrives, not after.
• If you already pay for Copilot, look at the admin settings. Check whether anyone has created a spending policy, and whether "Auto-apply new services" is on.
• Compare the total cost. Microsoft itself says to compare "the total cost with the alternatives." For some jobs a focused tool built for that task will be cheaper and more reliable than a general agent. For others, Autopilot will be the better choice.

Your Next Step

Microsoft has made the shift official: AI at work now comes as a chat box you pay a flat fee for, and a digital worker you pay for by the hour. The businesses that do well with the second kind will be the ones that manage it like staff, with a clear role, a budget and someone who checks the work.

If you are weighing up Microsoft against the other options, our guide to Claude for Small Business and its ready-made workflows covers Anthropic's version of the same idea, and our explainer on how AI agents are taking over repetitive business tasks sets out where agents earn their keep. If you would like help choosing the first job to hand to an agent, and working out what it should cost, talk to us. We will tell you honestly if a simpler tool would do the job better.