Three things shipped in the latest Cowork update, and now I can do things I've done with my personal agents but in my work context (emails, files, data, …).
The capabilities themselves have been available in custom-built private agents for a while: agentic execution, reusable skills, mobile capture. What changed yesterday is that the same patterns now run inside my Microsoft 365 tenant, on top of identity I trust and governance my IT team can defend. That means I can actually use them for real work!
Three things changed. Each one is worth understanding for what it makes possible.
Skills are how Cowork understands and executes "the way we do this"
Cowork Skills are reusable sets of instructions you build once and call from any future task. They are functionally Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for an agent.
For example, when I do a Microsoft 365 PSC Roadmap with a client in the past, there’s a process. These are repeatable patterns that have lived in playbooks, templates, and people's heads. Building them as Skills, they become consistent, repeatable, and executable by anyone with the right expertise so we can deliver faster and with more value than ever before.
Two design choices make Skills more than glorified templates.
Skills travel with the agent across surfaces. The same Skill called from the Cowork mobile app on a phone runs the same way in the Cowork canvas at a desk. The SOP is enforced regardless of where the work originates.
Skills can call other Skills. Complex workflows compose naturally. A "draft a client roadmap section" Skill calls a "summarize our recent meetings with this client" Skill, which calls a "pull current consumption metrics for this tenant" Skill. Each Skill stays simple and inspectable. The composition is where the leverage compounds. It gets delivered to me, I validate the data we collected and add in the human element that can’t quite be captured. It doesn’t take the value out of two things. The meeting that built the plan and the human element needed to make it real. It accelerates the rest, significantly and consistently.
Your competitive advantage still lives in how you do the work. Skills let that knowledge be encoded in a way that improves with use, accelerates outcomes, and can be shared across team members. Virtually every business with knowledge workers suffers from tribal knowledge. This is an opportunity to address that.
Plugins and connectors mean the agent actually works inside your business systems
The plugin and connector wave is bigger than the headline names. Native Cowork integrations now include Fabric IQ for Power BI, the full Dynamics 365 family across sales, service, and ERP, and a growing list of third-party integrations (LSEG, Miro, monday.com, S&P Global Energy) with more arriving every week.
Cowork can read, write, and act inside the business platforms where the data and work should live, with the same identity, governance, and audit trail your tenant already enforces through Entra ID, Purview, and Defender. The agent operates with its own Entra identity, inside the existing trust boundary, with audit events flowing into the same systems your team already monitors.
Without that governance posture, AI features tend to live as shadow IT until the security team finds them and shuts them down. More importantly, without access to your business data across all line of business platforms, users tend to move data to where it can be used. Not good. With it, the same features extend an environment IT already governs, which means CISOs can actually sign off on rolling these agents out to the rest of the organization.
Mobile turns where the work happens into where it gets done
The Cowork mobile experience increases the effectiveness of the workday for people whose work is mostly meetings, mostly travel, or mostly responding to what just happened in front of them.
This is something I have seen personal gains from in 2026. I see something, have an idea, try to remember that idea “when I get home”. 1 out of 10 get executed if I am lucky. Now, I see that same idea, describes a task and thoughts on my phone, Cowork plans it, executes against M365 and the connected systems, and the work continues in the cloud whether the app stays open or not. By the time I am back at a desk, the output is waiting for me to take action and I have a task holding me accountable in my Microsoft ToDo. (How do you think this blog got written).
The simplest example is expense filing. A photo of a receipt, a verbal note about the meeting context, and the expense lands in the approval queue with category, attendees, and reimbursement coding before the user closes the app. The harder examples are the ones that matter more for revenue work: capturing follow-up commitments coming out of a client meeting, drafting a board update from an unstructured set of inputs collected over a week of travel, pulling together a customer briefing while you walk to the next meeting.
The pattern that emerges is "capture the intent the moment it occurs, because time to execute and where you are is no longer a roadblock.". “Shower Thoughts” might get more interesting.
What to do now
Cowork is in Frontier early access right now, with broader availability targeted around Microsoft Inspire in July. The teams that arrive at Inspire with Skills already designed, plugins already governed, and a handful of users already trained on the mobile capture pattern will move dramatically faster than the teams encountering it for the first time at GA.
Identify the workflows in your organization that should become Skills. Anything repeatable, where you need consistency, and currently living in someone's head. Roadmaps, reviews, briefings, customer summaries, internal status updates.
Inventory the business systems Cowork should be allowed to act in. Which are already in scope through Entra ID and Purview governance, which need policy updates first, which need a security conversation before the agent gets near them.
Pick a small mobile pilot. Get your users acquainted with well-understood workflow they know where it provides value and they can see the benefit. Be ready to capture the next wave of ideas they produce.
If you want to talk through which workflows belong as Skills, which integrations to enable first, and how to roll the mobile capability out without creating new governance gaps, reach out.