Microsoft's Copilot Cowork, announced 9 March 2026 and built on the same agentic harness as Claude Cowork, makes the promises that enterprise want to hear:
- cloud execution inside the customer's M365 tenant;
- identity and compliance controls inherited by default;
- grounding across the full graph of emails, meetings, files, and messages.
Microsoft is selling governance, security and organisational data integration.
Conspicuously absent though is the open plugin system where anyone can author, customise per-firm, and distribute through private marketplaces - obviously the main selling point of Claude Cowork, which is also bundled with all the tooling required to create new plugins.
A product that triages a calendar is useful; a product that also executes the firm's engagement letter workflow, runs a due diligence checklist against legal's red flags register, and pulls data from a sector-specific provider is a different proposition entirely. Claude Cowork enables the latter today.
The product is still in research preview, so let's hope that an easier way to author custom skills is coming!