Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork arrives with smarter AI research tools to spot gaps in your work

Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled Copilot Cowork, which is based on Anthropic’s Claude Cowork.

Now, the company has rolled out Copilot Cowork in early access through its Frontier program, alongside new upgrades to its Researcher tool that will help you plan, analyze, and make decisions at work.

So what can Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork do for you?

Copilot Cowork is an agentic AI tool built for handling long, multi-step tasks inside Microsoft 365. It can help you think through tasks, break down goals, and work alongside you like a colleague across documents and workflows.

You describe the outcome you want, and it creates a plan and completes the task while showing you its progress. You can also step in and redirect it at any point. It can handle everything from one-off requests to repeating workflows like monthly budget reviews.

New AI features in Copilot’s Researcher tool

Microsoft is also upgrading Researcher, its deep research feature inside Copilot, with two key additions.

The first is Critique, a new setup where two AI models work together on the same task. OpenAI’s GPT generates the initial response, and Anthropic’s Claude reviews it for accuracy and quality before it reaches you.

According to Reuters, Microsoft plans to make this interaction bi-directional in the future, meaning Claude’s drafts could eventually be reviewed by GPT, too.

According to Microsoft, this feature improved the Researcher tool’s score by 13.8% on the DRACO benchmark, the industry standard for measuring accuracy and quality of deep research.

The second addition is a new model Council, which lets you pull responses from different AI models and compare them side by side. You can instantly see where they agree, where they differ, and what each brings uniquely to your question.

Microsoft says all of this is part of Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a push to move AI from a tool you experiment with to one that actively does your work for you.