Microsoft (MSFT) is bringing Anthropic’s (ANTH.PVT) Claude Cowork to its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI platform. Called Copilot Cowork, the service, which Microsoft says it developed in close collaboration with Anthropic, can perform tasks on enterprise users’ behalf, such as building presentations, pulling data into spreadsheets in Excel, and emailing co-workers to set up meetings.
The update arms Microsoft with the AI platform that rocked the software-as-a-service industry last month, sending shares of stalwarts like Salesforce (CRM), ServiceNow (NOW), Thomson Reuters (TRI), and Intuit (INTU) plummeting.
And while they’ve recovered some of those losses, the stocks are still down since Anthropic debuted Cowork on Jan. 30.
For Microsoft, the update adds agentic capabilities to its existing AI offerings, expanding Microsoft 365’s overall usefulness and driving further enterprise adoption.
The company says it’s continuing to see success in AI sales, with paid Microsoft 365 seats growing 160% year over year in its most recent quarter and daily active usage increasing 10x.
“Expansion is also accelerating as the number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale — more than 35,000 seats — tripled year over year. Just last week, Mercedes Benz announced a global rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot, following recent investments from NASA, Fiserv, ING, the University of Kentucky, the University of Manchester, the US Department of the Interior, and Westpac,” the company said in a statement.
In addition to Copilot Cowork, Microsoft announced it is bringing new agentic AI functionalities to Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. That also includes a more powerful Copilot Chat.
The company also said its Microsoft Agent 365, an AI agent monitoring and governance platform, is now generally available for $15 per user per month.
Toss all of Microsoft’s 365 offerings together, including Microsoft Entra and Microsoft Copilot 365, and you’ve got the company’s Microsoft 365 E7 suite. That costs $99 per user a month, less than buying all of the services on their own, the company said.
Microsoft and its fellow hyperscalers Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), along with social media giant Meta (META), are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building out AI data centers, and while Microsoft has its cloud business through which it sells cloud computing and AI capabilities that customers access remotely, the company also relies on sales of its productivity suites.
And Wall Street has been especially anxious to see whether Microsoft is successfully monetizing its vast AI investments across both its cloud services and software offerings.
