Service · Copilot Cowork

Copilot Cowork, adopted and governed.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork moves Copilot from answering questions to doing the work: long-running, multi-step tasks that run across your apps while you stay in control. It also introduces a new way to pay for AI, usage-based billing through Copilot Credits. Centered Networks stands Cowork up in a governed configuration and runs the cost controls, so the spend stays a line item your board can interrogate rather than a surprise on the invoice.

Get a Cowork cost estimate See how Copilot Credits work →
License plus usage Governed by policy Month-to-month from day one

Generally available since June 16, 2026. Requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

What Cowork is

From answering questions to doing the work.

Until now, Copilot has mostly helped one step at a time: draft this, summarize that, answer a question. You still connected the steps and finished the work. Cowork changes the kind of work AI takes on. You describe the outcome you want, and Cowork plans the steps, reasons across your emails, files, meetings, and business systems, and carries the work forward over minutes to hours, sending communications, building documents, organizing files, and scheduling, while you stay in control with checkpoints along the way.

It is grounded in Work IQ, the layer that gives Copilot real business context, and it runs inside the Microsoft 365 security, compliance, and governance boundary your organization already has in place. Because it is cloud-native, it keeps working after you close your laptop and saves every output to OneDrive as protected, ready-to-share work.

Copilot Chat, Copilot Cowork, and Microsoft Scout: when to use each.

  Copilot Chat Copilot Cowork Microsoft Scout
What it is Your secure AI for work: fast answers, drafts, and ideas grounded in your data. Your AI that gets the work done: a multi-step agentic system that takes actions across your apps. Your always-on personal agent that tracks, nudges, and moves work forward without being asked.
Best for Fast, focused tasks in one conversation: draft, summarize, brainstorm, Q&A. Complex, multi-step work spanning multiple apps: end-to-end deliverables. Ongoing work that unfolds over time, day after day.
Speed Fast: seconds to minutes. Thorough: works autonomously for minutes to hours. Continuous: works in the background.
How it is billed Included in the Microsoft 365 Copilot license. License plus usage, metered in Copilot Credits. In private preview; usage-based when generally available.
Use when You need a quick draft, a fast answer, or an idea. You need Copilot to go do the work: a multi-deliverable request across apps and files. You want work taken off your plate proactively.

Rule of thumb: one app for one file, Copilot Cowork for an entire process, Microsoft Scout to stay ahead of your day. Scout is in private preview today, so most organizations start with Chat and Cowork.

The cost model

Seats, plus usage. Copilot Credits, explained.

The whole industry is moving from paying per seat to paying per seat plus usage. The Microsoft 365 Copilot license stays the floor. When Cowork takes on real, long-running work, that work is metered separately in Copilot Credits, so you pay in proportion to what the AI actually does.

How you buy

Two ways to purchase credits

  • Pay-as-you-go at 0.01 US dollars per credit. No up-front commitment; you pay in arrears for what you used. Best when usage is still variable.
  • Prepaid credit packs bought annually at a volume discount, from 5 percent up to 20 percent at the largest tiers. Prepaid credits are always spent before pay-as-you-go, so you capture the discount first.

Credits are a single, pooled currency at the tenant level, shared across Cowork, Work IQ APIs, Copilot Studio agents, and Dynamics 365 agents.

What a task costs

Cost scales with the work

  • Light (a recurring weekly status draft): roughly 70 to 200 credits.
  • Medium (a meeting-prep briefing from email, calendar, and CRM): roughly 400 to 600 credits.
  • Heavy (a six-month usage analysis into a leadership-ready report): often more than 1,500 credits.

Each task's cost depends on the models chosen, the orchestration steps, the context pulled in, and the tools it uses. That variability is exactly why budgets and policies matter.

These are Microsoft's illustrative planning figures, not a price sheet. At 0.01 US dollars per credit, a light task is a few dollars and a heavy one is around fifteen dollars or more. We build a real estimate for your organization from your user count and expected task mix.

Why this needs governing

Usage-based AI is powerful. Ungoverned, it is a budget you cannot predict.

Turning Cowork on is a switch. The risk is not the switch, it is the meter behind it. When AI is billed by the work it performs, a single power user or an unbounded agent can run up spend nobody budgeted for, and the value only shows up if your teams know which tasks are actually worth delegating. That is the same pattern we see with shadow AI: capability arrives faster than the controls, and finance finds out last.

The answer is the one we bring to everything: governance first. Set the guardrails before the usage, make the spend visible, and put the decisions in the hands of the people accountable for the budget. Microsoft gives you the controls, a Cost Management dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Someone has to configure them correctly, run them, and translate the numbers into a decision the board can make.

The point of usage-based AI is to pay for outcomes. That only works if you can see the outcomes, and the spend, clearly enough to steer.

What we do

Two ways to work, same governed outcome.

Stand it up as a fixed-fee project, run it as an ongoing managed service, or start with the project and graduate into the managed retainer. Both are built on the Cost Management dashboard in your own Microsoft 365 admin center, so you always own the controls.

Implement

Stand up Cowork, governed

A fixed-fee project to turn Cowork on the right way.

  • Confirm the Microsoft 365 Copilot license baseline and connect usage-based billing to the correct subscription.
  • Configure the default spending policy, then scoped policies by group and user with monthly budgets, hard caps, and alerts.
  • Plan credit purchasing: model expected volume, set the prepaid-versus-pay-as-you-go mix, and size the first budget.
  • Enable the high-value use cases for your teams with a starter task library, so adoption starts with work worth delegating.
  • Hand over a written runbook and a first monthly reporting view.

Run · most common

Cowork cost management, managed

An ongoing retainer that keeps spend governed and value rising.

  • Monitor credit usage and runway continuously, with proactive alerts before limits are hit.
  • Tune budgets, caps, and policies as teams and usage change, month over month.
  • Optimize the credit mix: rebalance prepaid and pay-as-you-go to hold down the per-credit cost.
  • Grow adoption of the use cases that earn their keep, and retire the ones that do not.
  • Deliver a plain-language monthly report: where credits went, by team and by agent, and whether the spend paid off.

This complements, and does not replace, the rest of the practice. Already running custom agents? Managed AgentOps operates those. Want the full governed Copilot and agent program? CompleteCare Intelligence is the umbrella.

Pricing

Sized to your users and your credit volume.

Month-to-month on the managed service. No 12-month lock-in, no termination fee. Final pricing is confirmed on the scoping call once we understand your environment and expected usage.

Implement

Governed stand-up

$25,000 to $50,000

Fixed-fee, one-time. Scales with user count, scenario scope, and whether initial agents are in scope.

Billing wired, spending policies and budgets configured, credit plan built, an envisioning workshop to prioritize high-value scenarios, use cases enabled with a starter task library, and a runbook delivered. Microsoft Copilot Accelerate funding may offset part of the fee.

Run · most common

Managed cost governance

$5,000 to $10,000 / month

Month-to-month. Scoped to credit volume and the number of teams under policy.

Ongoing monitoring, optimization, policy tuning, adoption growth, and a plain-language monthly usage-and-spend report.

Cowork usage itself (the Copilot Credits) is billed by Microsoft through your tenant. As your CSP we can consolidate it on your Microsoft invoice. Our fee covers the governance, optimization, and reporting, not the credits themselves.

Built for mission-driven organizations adopting agentic AI.

This is built for you if

  • You have Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses and want to move from Chat into real, multi-step work
  • Cowork is your organization's first encounter with usage-based AI billing
  • Your finance leader wants spend predictable and attributable before you scale usage
  • Your IT team is small and does not have the bandwidth to run Cost Management policies day to day
  • Your board or funders expect AI adoption to be governed, not improvised
  • You are a nonprofit, foundation, grantmaker, or rural hospital on Microsoft 365

This is not the right start if

  • You do not yet have Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses: start with Copilot Kickstart or the Discovery Sprint
  • Your tenant is not yet governed at baseline: CompleteCare Foundations comes first
  • You want custom agents built and operated: that is Agent Launchpad and Managed AgentOps
  • You only need occasional single-session help: Copilot Chat is included in your license already

Questions

Frequently asked questions about Copilot Cowork.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork?

Copilot Cowork is an agentic capability in Microsoft 365 Copilot that plans and executes long-running, multi-step work across your apps: drafting and sending communications, organizing files, building documents, scheduling, and coordinating across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Where Copilot Chat answers a question in one session, Cowork takes an outcome you describe and carries the work forward over minutes to hours while you stay in control with checkpoints. It reached general availability on June 16, 2026.

How is Copilot Cowork billed?

Cowork requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license as a prerequisite, and usage is billed separately through Copilot Credits. This is the shift from paying per seat to paying per seat plus usage: the license stays the floor, and the work Cowork performs is metered. Credits are pooled at the tenant, purchased pay-as-you-go at 0.01 US dollars per credit or prepaid at a volume discount, and governed through spending policies in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

How much does a Cowork task cost in credits?

Microsoft publishes illustrative planning ranges: a light task such as a recurring weekly status draft runs roughly 70 to 200 credits, a medium task such as a meeting-prep briefing runs roughly 400 to 600 credits, and a heavy task such as a six-month usage analysis can exceed 1,500 credits. At 0.01 US dollars per credit, that is a few dollars for a light task and around fifteen dollars or more for a heavy one. Actual cost varies with the models, orchestration steps, context, and tools each task uses, which is exactly why budgets and policies matter.

Why do we need help adopting Cowork? Can we not just turn it on?

You can turn it on. The risk is not the switch, it is the meter. Usage-based billing means a single power user or an unbounded agent can run up spend that no one budgeted for, and the value only appears if staff know which tasks are worth delegating. We set the guardrails first (spending policies, per-user and per-group caps, alerts), optimize how credits are purchased, enable the high-value use cases for your teams, and report usage and spend every month so it stays a line item you can interrogate rather than a surprise on the invoice.

Where do the cost controls live, and who operates them?

Cost Management lives in the Microsoft 365 admin center: a default spending policy for the tenant, then scoped policies by group or user with monthly budgets, hard caps, alerts, and per-service selection, plus reporting by user, group, and agent. As your Microsoft partner and CSP, we configure it, run it as a managed service if you want us to, and translate the reporting into a plain-language monthly view of where credits went and whether the spend earned its keep.

Does this replace Managed AgentOps or CompleteCare Intelligence?

No, it complements them. Cowork Adoption and Cost Management is focused on the Cowork capability and its credit spend specifically. If you are already running custom agents, Managed AgentOps operates those; if you want the full governed Copilot and agent program, CompleteCare Intelligence is the umbrella. Many organizations start here because Cowork is the first place usage-based billing shows up, then grow into the broader program.

Is this a fit for a small mission-driven organization?

Yes, and the cost discipline matters more when the budget is tight. We size the engagement to your user count and expected credit volume, translate Microsoft's enterprise framing down to a nonprofit, foundation, or rural-hospital scale, and lead with governance and predictable spend rather than delegating everything to an agent on day one.

Microsoft alignment

A Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work, Security, and Data and AI.

We adopt Cowork on the same governed Microsoft stack we run across the practice, and manage the credit spend as your Cloud Solution Provider.

Microsoft Solutions Partner: Modern Work designation badge. Microsoft Solutions Partner: Security designation badge. Microsoft Solutions Partner: Data and AI (Azure) designation badge.
  • Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work
  • Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security
  • Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data and AI (Azure)
  • Charity-authorized Microsoft CSP
  • Copilot Credits managed on your Microsoft invoice
The No-Lock-In Promise mark: month-to-month from day one, no 12-month contract, no termination fee, with a 30-day exit chip.

Adopt Cowork with the guardrails on.

Tell us how many Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses you have, what you want Cowork to take off your teams' plates, and who owns the AI budget. We confirm scope on a 30-minute call and come back with a governed plan and a real credit estimate.

Not sure Cowork is the right starting point? Start with a Discovery Sprint → and we will place it in the right sequence.

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A senior member of our team will reach out within one business day to confirm scope and schedule the call.