Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the AI assistant Microsoft has woven across Windows, Edge, Bing, and the Microsoft 365 apps. It was recently renamed: the Microsoft 365 Copilot app is now called Microsoft Copilot, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat app is now called Microsoft Copilot Chat.

Licensing is organized into tiers: Copilot Chat (Basic), Microsoft 365 Copilot (Basic), which gives standard Copilot access inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote without a separate add-on, and Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium), an add-on with expanded access. Microsoft has also introduced Copilot Cowork, a usage-based product for broader agentic work, and Microsoft 365 E7 enterprise plans include Copilot licensing by default. At a Windows event on October 7, 2026, Microsoft said it is repositioning Copilot on Windows away from a simple chat window toward an assistant that can use local context from a user's PC and take actions on it.

Day to day, Copilot routes requests through a model selector with Auto, Quick response, and Think deeper options rather than exposing specific model version numbers. Anthropic's models are also available in applicable licensed experiences; Word's model menu, for example, now includes an Anthropic model as the default for higher-reasoning tasks. Microsoft has announced that Copilot will gain the ability to use local context and run local models, coming to Copilot+ PCs in the coming months, and it has shipped Microsoft Execution Containers, a policy-driven containment layer for AI agents running on Windows, which is now generally available.

Pricing could not be verified on Microsoft's own pricing pages at the time of this review, so specific dollar figures are omitted here. What is confirmed is the tier structure above: a basic chat experience, a basic in-app tier, a paid Premium add-on, and the newer usage-based Cowork product. Copilot Chat (Basic) is included at no extra cost for users with an eligible Microsoft 365 work subscription, but this is not a standalone free plan open to the general public.

The main limitations are that Microsoft's licensing and naming are genuinely hard to follow across consumer, Business, and enterprise SKUs, current pricing is not transparently published, and the strongest in-app features require a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license rather than being available to casual users. The newly announced local-context and local-action features are not yet available and are only slated to arrive on Copilot+ PCs in the coming months.

Copilot makes the most sense for people and organizations already inside Microsoft 365 who want an assistant that reaches into their documents, mail, and calendar rather than a standalone chatbot, and for Windows users watching Copilot evolve from a chat panel into a PC-level agent.