Your Microsoft Copilot workflow companions

Microsoft Copilot is built on large language models (LLMs)—AI trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate natural language—alongside Microsoft Graph, which connects Copilot to your organization's emails, documents, meetings, and chats. These two components power a toolkit of AI experiences designed for different kinds of work.

The Microsoft Copilot toolkit

Microsoft offers three AI experiences tailored to the way business professionals work: Microsoft Copilot Chat, Microsoft Copilot, and Copilot Cowork. Each one solves a different kind of problem, and together they cover the full range of everyday AI needs—from quick questions to complex, multi-step tasks.

Understanding the differences helps you choose the right workflow companion for each situation and get the most value from AI in your organization.

Microsoft Copilot Chat

Microsoft Copilot Chat is included with your Microsoft 365 subscription at no extra cost. It's an AI-powered chat experience grounded in real-time web information—grounding is the source data Copilot uses to shape its responses—meaning it draws on publicly available content to help you research topics, brainstorm ideas, draft content, and get quick answers.

Because Copilot Chat uses web grounding by default, it doesn't access your organization's files, emails, or meetings on its own. This makes it a good low-risk starting point for building AI confidence—you can practice prompting and explore what AI can do before connecting it to your work data.

Copilot Chat is available in a browser, in the Microsoft 365 app, and in Microsoft Edge, and it includes enterprise data protection that keeps your conversations private and prevents your data from being used to train AI models.

When you add a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Copilot Chat gains the ability to ground responses in your work data—your files, emails, meetings, and chats—in addition to the web.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the licensed experience that brings AI directly into your Microsoft 365 apps. With a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you get AI assistance embedded in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more—so Copilot is available wherever you're already working, without switching to a separate window.

The licensed experience connects to your work data through Microsoft Graph so it understands the context of your role, your team, and your projects. When you ask Copilot to summarize a meeting or draft a follow-up email, it draws on that organizational context to give you a relevant, personalized response.

Licensed Copilot also gives you access to advanced agents—such as the Researcher and Analyst agents—that can reason across large amounts of information and deliver structured, cited reports. Your organization can also deploy custom agents tailored to specific business processes.

Copilot Cowork

Copilot Cowork takes AI further by acting across your Microsoft 365 apps on your behalf. Where Copilot Chat and in-app Copilot help you complete individual tasks in a single session, Cowork is designed for multi-step, autonomous work that spans multiple apps and can take minutes or hours to complete.

For example, you could ask Cowork to draft a project status report, send it to your team in Teams, schedule a follow-up meeting, and create a task list in Planner—all as a single instruction. Cowork runs these steps in sequence, checking in when a decision requires your input.

Cowork is available to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and uses usage-based billing, so costs are based on the tasks it completes. Your organization controls which users can access Cowork and sets governance policies to define what it can act on. Check with your IT or admin team to confirm whether Cowork is available to you and to understand any usage policies that apply.

Choosing the right tool

The following table shows how each tool differs and when to use it:

Think back to the retail marketing scenario from the introduction: Copilot Chat helps you quickly research a competitor's campaign or brainstorm product messaging. Microsoft Copilot in Word drafts your promotional content, while Copilot in PowerPoint builds the presentation. When it's time to coordinate the full launch—sending briefings, scheduling reviews, and creating action items—Cowork handles those steps together.

To explore Copilot Chat, see Get started with Microsoft Copilot Chat (Basic). To learn how Microsoft Copilot works inside Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, see Draft and refine business content using Microsoft Copilot. To go deeper on Cowork and how to delegate work to it, see Delegate work with Copilot Cowork.