This is Part 2 of our series on getting more out of Microsoft Copilot. If you have not read Part 1 on prompting best practices, start there first.
If traditional Copilot acts as a smart assistant that answers questions, Copilot Cowork is an AI that completes work for you. Most organizations using Microsoft 365 Copilot today see it as an assistant. You ask it to summarize a document, draft an email, or analyze a spreadsheet, and it responds quickly. This is useful, but it operates within one app and one prompt at a time. Cowork offers a different category of capability entirely.
What Copilot Cowork Actually Does
Cowork became generally available on June 16, 2026. Instead of responding to a single prompt, Cowork takes a description of an outcome, creates a plan, and executes it across the Microsoft 365 applications your team already uses. One request can start a workflow that moves through Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint over minutes or hours, resulting in multiple completed deliverables instead of just one response.
Powered by Work IQ, Cowork draws on signals from your emails, calendar, Teams chats, SharePoint files, and organizational connections. This means the work it produces is based on how your business actually operates, not just what is available online.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A sales leader points Cowork at a stalled pipeline and receives a ranked list of at-risk opportunities along with follow-up details for each one, collapsing a week of manual review into a single morning. One team used Cowork to compare nearly four thousand files across two product versions, a task that would have taken weeks if done manually.
Cowork can send emails, schedule meetings, create documents, post in Teams, search your organization, manage files, and conduct thorough research across various sources. It can show you each step as it works so you can stay in control, and it asks for your approval before taking actions on your behalf.
Custom Skills and Reusable Workflows
One of Cowork’s most useful features is the ability to create custom skills. A skill is a reusable set of instructions that details how you want a specific task done, covering structure, tone, and process. Once you create a skill, Cowork applies it automatically every time that task comes up without needing to start from scratch.
This is particularly useful for recurring work like weekly status updates, pipeline reviews, customer communication templates, or any other process your team runs on a regular basis.
What This Means for Dynamics 365 Users
For organizations using Dynamics 365, Cowork integrates directly with Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and other applications through plugins. Pipeline reviews, case resolutions, and approval workflows can all be managed through Cowork, with your CRM data providing the context and background for every recommendation.
This connection matters because Cowork does not work from generic information. It works from your actual customer records, open opportunities, service history, and pipeline data. The outputs reflect your business, not a template.
What Does Agentic AI Actually Cost?
This is a question most organizations get to eventually and it is worth understanding before planning a rollout.
Copilot Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot User Subscription License and is then billed on a usage basis through Copilot Credits, Microsoft’s billing currency for agent usage introduced in September 2025.
There are two purchasing options through Copilot Studio for organizations building custom agents:
A Prepaid Pack runs $200 per month per tenant for 25,000 Copilot Credits. This works well for predictable, steady usage. Credits do not roll over and unused credits expire at the end of each month.
Pay-as-you-go billing runs $0.01 per Copilot Credit, billed through Azure at the end of each month based on actual consumption. No upfront commitment is required. An active Azure subscription is needed. This option suits pilots or organizations with variable monthly volumes.
For organizations running custom Copilot agents, each email processed consumes approximately 50 Copilot Credits across multiple AI prompt steps including sender identification, request type detection, data extraction, and follow-on actions. At $0.01 per credit, that works out to approximately $0.50 per email processed, plus any additional Azure service costs for document intelligence when attachments are involved.
For an organization processing 30 emails per month through an agent, the total cost including attachments runs approximately $15 to $17 per month at pay-as-you-go rates. For higher volumes, the prepaid pack becomes more cost effective.
Microsoft also provides a Cost Management Dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center where administrators can monitor credit usage, manage budgets, and set spending limits before usage ramps up.
Where to Go From Here
Copilot Cowork represents a meaningful shift in what AI can do inside Microsoft 365. Moving from single responses to multi-step workflows that execute across your entire environment changes how much time your team spends on work that a well-configured system could handle on its own.
The organizations that will get the most out of this are the ones that start with a clear understanding of their data, their processes, and where AI can actually make a difference. If you want to understand how Copilot and agentic AI fit into your specific Dynamics 365 environment, that is exactly the conversation we have in our free AI Readiness Assessment.
Book a session with our team at Dyn365Pros and we will help you figure out where to start.
Sources: Microsoft Learn: Copilot Cowork Overview; Microsoft 365 Blog: Copilot Cowork is Now Generally Available, June 2026; Microsoft Learn: Copilot Studio Billing and Licensing
