Amid rising demand for autonomous agents, Microsoft has added Anthropic's AI technology to its Copilot service. This comes weeks after the startup's new tools sparked a major selloff in software stocks.
On Monday, Microsoft introduced Copilot Cowork, an all-new tool in Microsoft 365 Copilot that is based on Anthropic's Claude Cowork - capable of handling complex tasks like creating apps, building spreadsheets as well as organising large volumes of data with limited human oversight.
In a blog post, the company said that Copilot Cowork runs within "Microsoft 365's security and governance boundaries." "Identity, permissions, and compliance policies apply by default, and actions and outputs are auditable. Cowork runs in a protected, sandboxed cloud environment, so tasks can keep progressing safely as you move across devices. This is what makes execution durable at enterprise scale," it stated.
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For this, the company is "working closely" with Anthropic to integrate the technology behind Claude Cowork into Microsoft 365 Copilot.
"It is this multi-model advantage that makes Copilot different. Your work is not limited by one brand of models," it added.
With the help of Copilot Cowork, users are now allowed to describe a task and then let it convert the request into a workflow running across different Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, Teams and Excel.
At present, Copilot Cowork is being tested with a limited set of customers in Research Preview. The company is looking forward to make it available more broadly in the Frontier program later this month.
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Copilot Cowork is aimed at converting user's request into a plan that runs in the background. They can review the steps, approve suggested actions and even pause execution or provide clarification wherever required.
After carefully taking into consideration all the demands, Cowork automatically grounds the task in emails, meetings, messages, files and data. Notably, it uses signals from Microsoft 365 apps through what is being described as 'Work IQ' to understand context and perform actions.
There are several work scenarios that the tool can handle. This includes cleaning up your calendar by reschedule meetings and protect focus time to conducting research on a company by pulling sources, compiling analysis, and packaging results.
It is even capable of compiling competitive comparisons and draft value propositions. The tool can create presentation material by outlining milestones.
The latest tool runs within Microsoft 365 security and governance controls, which includes identity permissions, compliance policies and auditability.
"Over the last year, we have been pushing Copilot toward taking action. That means completing tasks, running workflows, and doing work on your behalf," Microsoft said.
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