What’s new in Microsoft Copilot – October 2026: Home, Autopilot, Workspaces and DLP for Cowork

Microsoft Copilot’s October 2026 updates reorganize the Copilot app around a new Home that brings Chat and Cowork together, with projects, Workspaces (the evolution of Copilot Notebooks) and the announcement of Autopilot, an always-on personal agent. Cowork gets role-based plugins, Word a legal plugin, Excel accounting skills and PowerPoint the Sonnet 5.5 model.

On the admin side, two announcements deserve your attention: Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) expands to Cowork in public preview, and Copilot memory can now be preserved by retention policies. Many features arrive first through Frontier, which opens up to other Microsoft 365 products in November.

October’s updates at a glance

Feature	Where	Status
Home (Chat and Cowork) and shared navigation pane	Copilot app	Frontier in October, worldwide in November
Projects	Cowork, Copilot Chat	Cowork in October, Copilot Chat in November
Autopilot	Microsoft 365	Frontier, in November
Skills in Copilot Chat	Copilot Chat	November
Role-based plugins, task catalog, references to conversations	Cowork	Rolled out in October
OneNote and Planner	Cowork	Frontier in October, worldwide in November
Copilot Workspaces	Copilot app	Frontier
Prompt Gallery	OneDrive	Rolled out in October
Knowledge base	SharePoint	Frontier
Accounting skills, clean data, interactive canvas	Excel	Depends on the feature (see below)
Sonnet 5.5, Brand Kit, interactive slides, skills	PowerPoint	Rolled out in October
Legal plugin, formatting, Markdown	Word	Rolled out in October
New Copilot experience	Edge	Rolling out
Intelligent recap without a transcript	Teams	Worldwide in October
Copilot editing in Word, Excel and PowerPoint	GCC	Rolled out in October
Insights Agent	Copilot Chat	Rolled out in October (V2 in Frontier preview)
Copilot memory retention	Microsoft Purview	Rolled out in October
DLP for Cowork	Microsoft Purview	Public preview

Home, projects and Autopilot: the Copilot app gets reorganized

Home becomes the starting point of the Copilot app. It brings together Chat, for questions and first drafts, and Cowork, to delegate multi-step tasks. A shared navigation pane appears with:

• Plugins: one place for agents, skills and connectors;
• Automations: Cowork tasks that run on a schedule or when an event occurs;
• Workspaces: a shared team space;
• Projects: tasks, instructions and context kept together;
• a combined Chat and Cowork history, with search and filters.

This update is rolling out to Frontier in October and worldwide in November. Projects bring together shared instructions, files, meetings and chats, with an Outputs view of deliverables. They arrived in Cowork in October and are coming to Copilot Chat in November.

Skills are also expanding from Cowork to Copilot Chat in November: users will be able to create them in natural language and discover those shared by colleagues or the organization in the Plugins section. Finally, Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint adopts the Copilot app design (rolled out in October).

Autopilot, an always-on personal agent

Autopilot is a cloud-based personal agent that users give goals to. It has its own account, mailbox and files. Microsoft highlights access controls, approval guardrails and support for information-protection and compliance capabilities. With Agent 365, organizations can see who uses it, manage its access and assess risks. It is rolling out to Frontier in November.

An agent with its own identity that acts on behalf of a user is a new object to govern: decide who gets access before opening it up.

Copilot Cowork: role-based plugins, OneNote and Planner

Role-based plugins provide pre-built skills for Sales, Service, Education, Legal and Finance, in the Roles & Industry section. See available plugins for Copilot Cowork (rolled out in October).

Other updates:

• the OneNote plugin and Planner capabilities let Cowork read and update notebooks, plans and tasks, with the user’s approval (Frontier in October, worldwide in November);
• a task catalog of suggested tasks for sales, marketing, customer service and finance (rolled out in October);
• the ability to reference a previous Copilot Chat conversation or Cowork task in a new request (rolled out in October).

Copilot Workspaces replaces Copilot Notebooks

Copilot Workspaces is the evolution of Copilot Notebooks: existing notebooks become workspaces, with simultaneous collaboration and live cursors (Frontier in October). Users can create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without leaving the workspace (Frontier in October, worldwide in January).

Audio Overview offers topic-based episodes, the “Critique and Debate” format and more reference types (Outlook emails, Teams meetings, OneNote and Loop pages…). Key point: audio overviews saved to OneDrive inherit sensitivity labels from their sources (Frontier in October, worldwide in November). Workspaces also accept JPG, PNG, CSV and TSV files (rolled out in October).

Word, Excel and PowerPoint: role-specific skills and Brand Kit

In Word, the legal plugin brings more than 20 legal skills and partner-built plugins, building on Legal Agent: drafting from precedents, reviewing contracts against a playbook. Added to this are document-specific formatting and design and Markdown support, with conversion between .md and .docx on the web. Everything rolled out in October.

In Excel:

• accounting skills help reconcile accounts and prepare journal entries, with visible and reversible changes (Frontier in October, worldwide in November);
• the clean data skill finds duplicates, inconsistent formatting and incorrect data types, with every fix approved by the user (rolled out in October);
• the interactive canvas turns workbook data into a report that updates automatically (Insiders in October, worldwide in November).

In PowerPoint, the Sonnet 5.5 model improves layouts. Brand managers set up Brand Kits more easily, can publish and unpublish them and assess them with the template assessment skill. Users gain Create interactive slide and Record a skill. Everything rolled out in October.

OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Edge

• Prompt Gallery in OneDrive: ready-to-use prompts, organized by category (rolled out in October).
• Knowledge base in SharePoint: a knowledge base built from emails, meetings and SharePoint content, for people, Copilot and agents (Frontier in October).
• Intelligent recap without saving a transcript in Teams: organizers with a Copilot license get a summary without keeping the transcript (worldwide in October).
• Copilot in Microsoft Edge gets a new icon and a streamlined sidepane; existing security, compliance and enterprise controls stay the same.
• New life sciences connectors (PubMed, ChEMBL…) join Microsoft Marketplace, and Copilot editing in Word, Excel and PowerPoint arrives in GCC.

Administration: Insights Agent, retention and DLP for Cowork

Insights Agent answers natural-language questions about agent usage: active users, adoption trends, comparisons (rolled out in October). Insights Agent V2 (Frontier), an early-access preview, also shows agent owners ratings and comments, once an admin enables feedback sharing. Workforce Insights Agent, in public preview since December 2025, rolls out in November.

In Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, you can now configure retention for Microsoft Copilot memory (rolled out in October). And Purview DLP expands to Cowork in public preview: a single policy for Copilot Chat and Cowork that can prevent referencing content with a sensitivity label, block prompts containing supported sensitive data and stop them from being sent to Bing.

Also announced this month

• Office in the Copilot app: Word, Excel and PowerPoint open alongside the conversation, with coauthoring and files stored in OneDrive (Frontier, in Chat and Cowork).
• Notebooks: notebook creation with Copilot, simple automations, model choice and interactive reports, mostly for Frontier.
• Indirect prompt injection: Microsoft 365 Copilot adds a deterministic enforcement layer that handles untrusted content, such as external emails, separately. You need to enable the applicable Outlook sender setting and follow the guidance for CVE-2026-55145.
• Copilot for legal: more than 20 legal skills generally available and partner-built plugins (Harvey, iManage, Docusign…) rolling out through the plugin registry.
• Cowork opens up to Power Platform connectors (rolling out) and federated Copilot connectors via MCP. Admins decide what is available: see manage plugins for Cowork.
• Copilot Code: build applications in natural language, rolling out through Frontier.
• Frontier covers eligible public previews for new Outlook for Windows, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams starting in November. Users in Targeted release are not automatically enrolled.

What I recommend doing this month

1. Review your Frontier enrollment before November: start with a pilot group and check your Targeted release users. See get started with Frontier.
2. Test Purview DLP for Cowork on a pilot group, and decide on Copilot memory retention with your compliance team.
3. Enable the prompt injection protection setting referenced in CVE-2026-55145, starting with a test scope.
4. Configure agent feedback sharing (Agents > Settings > Agent feedback sharing), limiting it to selected agents at first. See agent settings.
5. Prepare governance for Autopilot and Cowork plugins: who gets access, which Power Platform and MCP connectors to allow, and how to monitor with Agent 365.