Microsoft made Copilot Cowork available to Frontier program members on March 30, marking the public debut of its long-running agentic AI layer for Microsoft 365.

What Copilot Cowork Does

Cowork is designed for tasks that span minutes or hours rather than a single prompt exchange. Users describe the outcome they want — a monthly budget review, a scheduled briefing, a multi-step research task — and the system creates a plan, works through it using Microsoft 365 data and tools, and shows visible progress along the way. Built-in skills include calendar management and daily briefing; the underlying technology comes from the same platform that powers Anthropic's Claude Cowork.

Capital Group, one of the early testers, described it as moving from "generating content" to "taking real action — connecting steps, coordinating tasks, and following through across everyday workflows."

Multi-Model Researcher: Critique and Council

The bigger architectural news is the redesigned Researcher agent. Two new features ship with Frontier access:

Critique splits research into two roles: one model plans, retrieves, and drafts; a second model (from a different Frontier lab) reviews and refines before output is delivered. On the DRACO benchmark — 100 complex research tasks across 10 domains — Researcher with Critique scored 13.8% higher than Perplexity Deep Research running Claude Opus 4.6. Improvements were largest in breadth of analysis (+3.33 points) and presentation quality (+3.04 points).

Council displays responses from multiple models side-by-side with a cover letter highlighting where they agree, where they diverge, and what each uniquely contributes.

Cowork and the updated Researcher are available now through Microsoft's Frontier early-access program.