Microsoft has announced a new set of products to get enterprise customers to build AI agents on its platform, including a new Copilot Cowork product built on top of Anthropic’s AI product Claude Cowork and a new business productivity software bundle that includes its own AI offerings.
The new products, which Microsoft is calling “Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot,” come as the software giant seeks to combat increased competition in the AI agent space both from rival business productivity software companies, such as Salesforce, and frontier AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which received billions of dollars in strategic investments from Microsoft but are nonetheless increasingly pursuing the U.S. tech giant’s traditional customer base. Microsoft also faces competition for AI agents from open-source offerings like OpenClaw.
Microsoft hopes to assuage investors concerned that AI agents will reduce companies’ need to rely on traditional software-as-a-service providers. The company’s shares have fallen more than 14% since Anthropic debuted its Claude Cowork product in mid-January.
At the heart of Microsoft’s announcement is Copilot Cowork, a new feature built in close collaboration with Anthropic. Copilot Cowork is designed to handle long-running, multistep tasks—such as preparing for a customer meeting by assembling a presentation, pulling together financials, emailing the team, and scheduling prep time—all from a single request.
“We really believe right now is an inflection point,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work, told Fortune. “The inflection point for us is Copilot taking on these agentic capabilities and going from assistance to real doing.”
