Microsoft's Copilot is an all-in-one AI app now as it tries to compete with Claude

Microsoft on Friday announced it's rolling out changes to Copilot for business users, bundling its AI chatbot, agents and coding capabilities into one app. The new Copilot app will have Home, Code and Autopilot tabs. Home is where you'll find Copilot Chat and Cowork combined, with the Microsoft Office suite of Word, Excel and PowerPoint built in. 

"Home is where you get your bearings, keeping you grounded and moving forward: review recent activity, get suggestions on what Copilot can help with, and pick up work right where you left off," Jared Spataro, Microsoft's chief marketing office of AI at work, wrote in a blog post. Code, he says, "moves solution-building outside the realm of developers alone" and lets users learn to build AI skills. 

Autopilot is a rebrand of the Scout AI personal assistant Microsoft introduced in June. "It shows up where people already work — Teams, Outlook, chats, channels and documents — so you can @mention it like a colleague, with permissions, audit and governance behind it," Spataro writes.

The Home and Code tabs will roll out in its Frontier program in the coming weeks, Spataro says, with Autopilot expanding in a private preview at the end of the month. Microsoft is also planning a Today feature, a "proactive, personalized command center across mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings and tasks," which enters private preview next month and is coming to Outlook and Teams as well.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned the change was coming during the company's fourth quarter earnings call in July, saying it was "bringing these Copilot experiences together, including code, in one super app." 

If this kind of all-in-one AI app sounds familiar, it's because other companies have already made similar moves. Anthropic combined Chat and Cowork in Claude earlier this month, and launched built-in docs and slides features to let users build documents and presentations directly within Claude. And Meta's Muse AI, its first entry into the AI assistants space, is rocketing up the app store lists just days after launch.

It appears this is the direction more tech companies are taking: One combined app connects its most popular existing programs with an AI agent, requiring users to engage with the AI while they also use other programs. "The way we work is changing and so are our workflows," Nadella wrote in an X post Friday. "This update brings AI into that flow."