Microsoft just shipped Copilot Cowork. An agentic AI layer powered by Anthropic’s Claude, running inside your M365 tenant, capable of executing multi-step tasks across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It is the most ambitious thing Microsoft has done with AI in the enterprise.
And it is going to be a disappointment. And a way for your leadership to say you are now doing agentic AI. It will be a disappointment because the substrate for your agents is a mess, and Microsoft’s incentives are not at all aligned with yours.
Copilot Cowork operates on top of Work IQ, Microsoft’s three-layered cake: a data layer that pulls signals from your M365 environment, a memory layer that remembers your preferences across sessions, and an inference layer that lets agents reason and act.
Think about what that gives you. Exactly what you are doing today, faster. “What did John say about the proposal?” “Find my recent PowerPoint presentations.” “What is on my calendar tomorrow?” “Summarise today’s messages in the Engineering channel.” Every example is recency-biased, user-scoped, and confined to the individual’s own activity bubble.
That is every seat now producing more. But I fear not producing a better outcome.
Your Echo Chamber, Not Your Organisation
Consider a scenario that plays out in every company of meaningful size. Research produces a competitive analysis and drops it on SharePoint. Marketing picks it up three weeks later and builds campaign assets from it. Sales use those assets in deals. Customer Success cites the original research in a QBR six months later. Every artifact in this chain lives in SharePoint. Every person involved is in the same M365 tenant. And yet none of these connections exist in Work IQ’s model.
You only ever see your own echo chamber. Not the organizational impact. Not how your work changed what someone else did downstream. Not whether the version being cited is still current. Work IQ remembers that you call a specific file “the Q2 deck.” It does not know that Marketing built a one-pager from your analysis, or that Sales closed a deal with it, or that Customer Success is citing a version that is two revisions behind.
Work IQ gives you more of the same sameness. It amplifies what people do today. It does not build the information architecture of what they could be doing tomorrow if the relevant information and insights were accessible.
And that is what we actually need. To understand how our work impacts that of others. To do things differently, not just faster.
Microsoft Is Making Money the More Mess You Make
Here is the thing about Microsoft’s business model that explains this gap better than any technical limitation.
Microsoft sells seats. $30 per user per month for Copilot, $99 for the new E7 bundle. Every product decision flows through a single filter: does this justify the per-seat price? That naturally pulls you toward features the individual user notices and values. Faster email drafting. Meeting prep. Finding your own files. The user is the buyer, or at least the person whose satisfaction determines renewal.
There is an second-order effect here. Microsoft also sells SharePoint storage. When your agents produce more content, more files, more versions. That sprawl is not a bug in Microsoft’s model. It is revenue. Copilot Cowork helps you produce ten drafts where you used to produce two.
You Need A Spine
The documents in SharePoint without some kind of connection are like chapters from a thousand books scattered across the floor. None of them tell a full coherent story. But look at your project management tools or ERP systems. They have the trails of real work. Who worked on what, when. Who picked it up next. And what impact it had in the end.
Project IDs. Budgets. Hours spent. Maybe even some way of getting to ROI. That is the spine for everything that happened in the organisation. If Research spent 200 hours on Project X in Q1, and Marketing logged 150 hours against the same project number in Q2, you already have the cross-functional handoff documented. Not in SharePoint metadata, but in the financial governance layer.
Nobody fills in SharePoint metadata voluntarily. But everyone reports on projects, that is the only way the project gets funded. Joining that information with your SharePoint mess allows you to start building the story arc of every single project. How the different documents are chained together.
But this likely won’t be a product you can buy anytime soon. SAP and Microsoft are not friends, and none of them hang out with Salesforce.
You have all the data you need to make your organisation genuinely smart in an agentic manner. Copilot Cowork is just not it. The goal is not for everyone to do the same things 10x faster. The goal is to figure out which 10% of what they do today actually moves the needle.