As I wrote a few weeks ago, 2026 is the year of agents in AI. Agents are built to do specific tasks, tied into your applications and data through connectors, and will help to automate more tasks that we want it to do for us. One example they show is having Outlook look at our calendar, seeing that our focus time is being taken up by meetings, then going about writing the emails and declining events to help us protect that focus time. Another is looking at an upcoming meeting, understanding what is going to need to be covered, preparing the Excel sheets with data from our financial database, turning that into charts and building a slide deck about it. This is AI that actually does work instead of just telling us how to do it.

While currently we can access Copilot in Word to generate a document, Copilot chat isn’t able to do that. This will change that. It will also be able to work with multiple programs in one prompt, so Cowork can generate a spreadsheet to learn something about our financials, then prepare the slide deck to present it to our management and a one-page document summary. This is what I think most people have been asking for.

What is also really interesting to me is how it will let you peek under the hood a bit to see how it is accomplishing tasks. I’ve noticed this more in other chats I’ve had, and initially thought it was maybe a bug or something, but it appears to be intentionally showing its work, so to speak. I was recently working on a prompt in Copilot for Sales, which has access to our client data in Dynamics. At each stage, it first described what it was going to do, then showed the code that it was executing to do that work. It was writing Python in real time to analyze my database, then handing that off to a new Python script that would sort it properly.

With Cowork, you’ll also be able to see under the hood when you ask it to clean up your calendar and approve each step of the way if you want to. You can even jump in and say, “Hey, not like that!” and stop it in the middle of a prompt. It’s fascinating to me that at the heart of all this intelligence is still just a bunch of computer code being run to get the output we want.

Anyways, I’m looking forward to putting Cowork to work for me in the near future. If I can just get this QuickBooks connector up and running…

-Nate