I’ll get back to it next week, but in the meantime big news!

On 9th March 2026, Microsoft dropped a pretty juicy announcement about the future of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If you’ve been following this blog series — hello, welcome back — you’ll know I’ve been going letter by letter through everything Copilot has to offer. But when big news lands, we pivot.

Here’s your no-jargon, no-waffle roundup of what was announced, and what it actually means for the people using these tools every day.

First — What’s a “Wave”?

Microsoft rolls out Copilot improvements in waves — think of them as major upgrade moments, where a significant batch of new features and capabilities are lumped together. Waves 1 and 2 are history, now we’re at Wave 3.

It’s worth understanding the direction of travel. The aim of each wave has moved Copilot towards something that’s embedded in your work rather than just another AI you chat to.  

Copilot Cowork

This one sounds like a proper shift in how Copilot works. Up until now, getting value out of Copilot has been a bit of a manual relay race. You ask it to research something, it does. Then you ask it to put that into a spreadsheet, it does. Then you ask it to summarise everything into a deck, it does. You’re the one moving the baton each time — Copilot is doing individual tasks, but you’re doing the joining up.

Cowork promises to change that. It’s designed to handle lots of process steps all together — taking on a complex task and seeing it through from start to finish without you having to manually nudge it along at every stage. Research, organise, summarise, create — all in one go, while you go and make a cup of tea. 

Microsoft has shared some example use cases, and they’ve got my attention (even if I can’t get my hands on it to test just yet).

Check out the details in their blog here: :Copilot Cowork: A new way of getting work done | Microsoft 365 Blog

Calendar management — Cowork can look at your packed diary and move meetings around to create breathing room or fix conflicts. Honestly? I’m already on top of my calendar, (smug face) so this isn’t the one that excites me most. But I do want to have a play about with it and see how helpful it is at playing calendar tetris. 

Side note; I’m always wary of things that promise to tidy up your calendar for you, feels impossible to give the tools the full context of how you’d prioritise time; “actually that double booking is fine because x reason”. Maybe I’m overthinking it… 

Customer meeting prep — This one did get me more excited. I have monthly meetings with customers, and right now I’m manually scouring through old emails and previous meeting transcripts to get up to speed before each one. It takes time, and it’s not exactly the most thrilling part of the job. The promise of Cowork is that it does all of that prep for you — pulling together the context, the history, the key threads — so you ‘walk in’ ready. (Does anyone still walk in to a meeting these days?!) If it delivers, this sounds like an absolute dream for anyone like me with regular customer meetings, like a customer success role.

Deep research with supporting artefacts — Copilot can already do deep research (you might have seen me mention Researcher in my A is for Agents blog). But Cowork takes it further — do the research and build a spreadsheet of the results and create a summary deck, all in one go. I’m already thinking about how this might help me with internal financial reporting. Watch this space.

Product launch planning — This one is about building multiple documents at once — a brief, a plan, a timeline. It’s powerful in principle, although I’ll be honest: for me, a product launch plan only really sings if it builds out a proper Planner board or kanban board in Loop with actions assigned to people. Without that, I think it’s missing a big chunk of the project planning value. Fingers crossed that’s coming.

Cowork is currently in research preview — being tested with a limited group before wider rollout. I’ll be first in the queue when it opens up, and I’ll be reporting back here when I do.

The Anthropic Collaboration (Hello, Claude! 👋)

Cowork is built in collaboration with Anthropic, the company behind an AI called Claude — and honestly, this makes complete sense to me. Claude is so good at complex, multi-step reasoning that Microsoft would almost be silly not to work with Anthropic on something like this.

Also of note; Microsoft is now offering model choice within Copilot — meaning different AI models can power different tasks, depending on what’s best suited. 

A Quick Word on Licensing (yawn)

There are two new things on the licensing front — Agent 365 (a new add-on for AI agents, generally available from 1st May) and Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite (a new premium bundle, also landing 1st May).

I’ll be honest, Microsoft licensing always sends my head in a spin. I won’t do it justice in this blog — if licensing is your thing, theMicrosoft announcement blog has the full breakdown. Or you can check out my MVP friends Ben Lee and Zach Bennett digging in to the maths and the detail in their podcast episode here: 365 Explained – 008 – E7 What’s new with SKU!? 

Over to You

I can’t test any of the Cowork use cases just yet — but I’m already thinking about which of my own multi-step processes I’d hand over to it first. Customer meeting prep is top of my list.

What about you? What’s the thing you do repeatedly that involves multiple steps, multiple tools, or a lot of manual joining-up? Drop it in the comments and let’s think through it together — because that’s exactly the kind of work Cowork is promising to take off our plates.

Normal service on the A-Z resumes next week, with H is for Hallucinations….