Copilot Chat vs Copilot Cowork

If you work in infrastructure or IT operations, "Copilot" probably means several different things in your week. There's one in the Azure portal, one in VS Code, one in Teams, and now there's Copilot Cowork as well.

The question I keep hearing is a fair one: when do I just ask Copilot Chat, and when do I hand a job to Cowork? Here's how I think about it, based on what Microsoft's documentation says each tool can and can't do today.

First, which Copilot are we talking about?

This post is about the Microsoft 365 side of things: your email, Teams chats, meetings and documents.

It's not about Azure Copilot (previously called Copilot in Azure, which I've written about before). That one lives in the Azure portal and mobile app and works against your Azure resources, respecting RBAC, PIM, Azure Policy and resource locks. It's not about GitHub Copilot in your editor either.

One naming note: Microsoft's documentation now calls it "Microsoft Copilot Chat", so you'll see both names floating around.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat?

Copilot Chat is a secure AI chat experience included with eligible Microsoft 365 licences. You don't need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence to use it.

What it can see depends on your licence:

• Without a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, it's mainly grounded in the web. It only works with your organisation's content when you paste it in, upload a file or reference one. Copilot Chat in Outlook goes a bit further and can answer questions across your emails, calendar, meetings, chats and a limited set of files.
• With a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, it can reason across the emails, meetings, chats and documents you already have permission to access.

Either way, Chat gives you an answer or a draft. What happens next is up to you.

What is Copilot Cowork?

Cowork is about delegation. You describe the outcome you want, and Cowork breaks it into steps and works through them. It can send emails, schedule meetings, create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, post in Teams, search across your organisation and manage files in OneDrive and SharePoint. It can also run prompts on a schedule, or when a matching email or Teams message arrives.

You can follow each step as it happens, and it asks for your approval before sensitive actions such as sending an email or posting a message.

Cowork is generally available for work and school accounts. According to the current documentation, you need a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and your admin has to enable usage-based billing. Cowork is billed on consumption, so talk to whoever owns your Microsoft 365 budget before you roll it out widely.

The key difference: getting help vs delegating a task

Here's the analogy that works for me. Copilot Chat is a bit like running Terraform plan. You get output to review, and nothing changes until you act on it.

Cowork is closer to a pipeline with manual approval gates. It does the steps for you, but stops for you to sign off on anything that leaves your hands.

Examples of how I use the tools

Building a conference deck: Cowork. I had a talk on end-of-support operating systems and modernisation coming up. I knew what I wanted each slide to say, but I didn't want to spend days fighting with layouts. So I gave Cowork a detailed brief: the colour scheme, the fonts, the images to use, the tone I was after, and the storyline for all 20 slides, with the key message for each.

It built the deck as a PowerPoint file in my OneDrive, turned my notes into slide titles and short supporting points, and gave the whole thing a consistent, clean design. It also added transitions that would have taken me hours to get right on my own.

Then I iterated. Each time something wasn't quite right, I told it what to change and it updated the deck. It felt like having a design assistant who never got tired of my feedback. I still went through every slide myself before I presented it, because the content had to be mine.

What would normally have taken me days of design work took a few hours, and the deck was still built from my ideas and my words.

Finding the right source: Copilot Chat. When I’m preparing for a customer conversation, I’ll often ask Chat to find the relevant internal guidance or public Microsoft documentation. For example, I might ask it to find the current Microsoft Learn page for a feature.  I still open the links and check the wording myself, especially if I’m going to share them with a customer.

Working through Azure pricing: Copilot Chat. When I need a rough price for an Azure service, I use Chat to help me work out how to query the Azure Retail Prices API. I can describe the region, SKU and pricing option I’m looking for, then ask it to help build the filter and make sense of the meters returned. It’s useful for getting past the “which field do I need?” stage, but I still check the result against the Azure pricing calculator and the customer’s actual pricing before sharing a figure. 

What neither tool does: change your infrastructure

Nothing in the Cowork documentation describes managing Azure resources directly. Its built-in skills are centred on Microsoft 365 work: email, calendar, Teams, documents and search. It can be extended with plugins and connectors, and it can complete tasks in Edge using sites you're already signed in to, but I wouldn't treat either as a route into production.

Infrastructure changes belong in your IaC pipelines and change process, in Github Copilot or in Azure Copilot, which acts against Azure only with your permissions and after you confirm.

Things to consider before you rely on either

• Permissions cut both ways. Both tools inherit your access, and neither can see anything you can't. That also means overshared SharePoint sites are fair game, so a permissions tidy-up is worth doing first.
• Check the sources. Microsoft notes that Cowork can produce inaccurate information when source data is incomplete or out of date. That three-year-old runbook will be used just as confidently as last week's. Ask it which files it used and open them.
• Treat output as a draft. That applies to change summaries and stakeholder emails alike.
• Be deliberate with approvals. For emails, Teams posts and meetings, the approval shows a preview of the content, and you can open the technical parameters too. "Always allow" skips prompts for similar actions for the rest of the session, so for email and Teams, limit it to one recipient or domain.
• Know the limits. Cowork can't browse files stored on your device, can't delete files in OneDrive or SharePoint, and can't read encrypted files. Attachments have to be under 200 MB.

So which should you use?

My rule of thumb is this: if you want an answer, use Chat. If you want something done, and doing it yourself would mean half an hour of switching between Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, use Cowork. If it touches Azure resources, use neither. Use your own knowledge, GitHub Copilot or Azure Copilot instead.

Which job in your week would you hand to Cowork first? Let me know in the comments.