Inside Microsoft’s big Copilot rethink

Inside Microsoft’s big Copilot rethink

By Tom Warren
Publication Date: 2026-10-01 16:00:00

Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hosted an intimate, invite-only event for leaders from some of its key enterprise customers. Instead of a flashy media event, Nadella outlined the future of Copilot directly to the customers Microsoft really cares about, pitching its latest rethink of the AI assistant as the “OS for work.”

Microsoft is adding coding and agent capabilities directly into Copilot, as well as bringing the full power of Office into Copilot for the first time. Nadella is betting that AI will change the way people work in the same way that Microsoft Office did in the ’80s and ’90s.

“How did a multinational company do a forecast in 1981? You had interoffice memos and faxes and all of these artifacts that then just disappeared and you suddenly had an Excel spreadsheet in an email,” said Nadella. “We are the architects of a new frontier of work, using these new tools and capabilities.”

Microsoft has spent the past few months fusing together its consumer and…