Copilot has always been a prompt-and-response tool. You ask it something, it responds. Useful, but reactive.

Cowork changes the model. Instead of prompting Copilot with a question, you delegate a goal.

'Compile a risk summary from the last three quarterly reports.'

'Review these 40 supplier contracts and flag anything that doesn't match our standard terms.'

'Pull together a briefing note on this client from our SharePoint files and recent email threads.'

Cowork plans the work, executes it across your Microsoft 365 environment, and delivers the output. You don't have to stay at your keyboard while it runs. It runs on GPT-5.5

 Thinking and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, with an Auto mode that picks the right model for each task.

This is the part that caught some organisations off guard at the end of July. And it's worth being very direct about it.

Cowork doesn't run on your per-seat Copilot licence alone. It uses Copilot Credits on top of it.

Credits are billed at $0.01 (R0.18 / £0.008) per credit. Every Cowork task consumes credits based on the model used, the volume of context retrieved, the number of tool calls made, and how long the task runs.

To give you a sense of what that looks like in practice:

Those numbers are per task. For a team running Cowork heavily, costs can accumulate quickly.

Teams that configured spend alerts and usage caps before expanding access managed their costs without surprises. Teams that enabled Cowork broadly without billing controls had an uncomfortable finance conversation at the end of July.

Configure spend alerts and usage caps in the Microsoft 365 admin centre before you expand Cowork access beyond a small pilot group. This is not optional. It's five minutes of setup that prevents a much longer conversation later.

Two billing options exist: pay-as-you-go at the standard rate, and prepaid annual credits at a lower per-credit rate. Pay-as-you-go is the right starting point for most organisations. Two to three weeks of pilot data tells you what your actual usage pattern looks like. Then you can make an informed decision about whether prepaid credits make economic sense.

Cowork executes tasks using the permissions of whoever initiates them. It reads email, accesses SharePoint, generates documents, and takes actions in connected apps — all based on whatever access the user already has.

This is why the permissions work that should precede any Copilot deployment matters even more before scaling Cowork. An overshared SharePoint environment doesn't become safer when Cowork starts running in it. It becomes a more efficiently exploited one.

Two things to have in place before you expand access:

•  Purview audit logging for Cowork activity — this is included in the GA baseline, but needs to be verified as active. It's what gives you the ability to see what Cowork actually did on behalf of a user.

•  Agent 365 governance — if you're using Agent 365, Cowork activity falls under the same governance framework. Agent 365 gives you visibility into Cowork as a managed agent alongside any others in your environment.

GTconsult helps organisations across South Africa, the UK, and the US get more from Microsoft 365 and SharePoint — from custom development and migrations to security, support, and AI solutions.