AI in Microsoft ERP · Copilot Cowork · Series 4 · #034
After three months in preview, Copilot Cowork went worldwide GA on June 16, 2026 — and it’s the closest thing yet to an agent that does ERP work rather than just answering questions about it. Here’s the practical breakdown.
Cowork vs. Copilot Chat: The Core Distinction
Where Copilot Chat answers questions, Cowork does the work. It’s designed for longer, multi-step tasks that span several apps — running in a secure cloud-hosted environment, which means tasks keep progressing even when your laptop is off, and your files aren’t stored on the device. This is the same agentic principle behind Scout, but Cowork is task-oriented and broadly available, while Scout is personal and still gated.
Practically: instead of asking Copilot to summarize a document, you assign Cowork a multi-step task – “pull together the Q2 variance summary from these three sources, draft the commentary, and prepare it as a PowerPoint for the leadership review” – and it works through the steps largely unattended, checking back in as needed.
The Cost Structure — Read This Before You Pilot
Cowork is off by default. An admin turns it on for the tenant and decides who gets access, with spending limits configurable at the tenant, group, and individual user level — which is an important control point for finance teams worried about runaway usage costs.
Billing is consumption-based: pay-as-you-go at $0.01 per Copilot Credit, or a prepaid commitment plan for a discount. The cost of each task depends on four factors: the AI model used, how much context it pulls in, the tools it calls, and how long the task runs. This is meaningfully different from the flat per-user licensing most organizations are used to with Microsoft 365 — it’s closer to a cloud compute billing model, and it requires the same kind of cost governance discipline.
What’s New for GA: Model Choice, Plugins, Cost Controls
- 🤖Model choice
- At GA, Cowork supports model selection (including Claude as an option.) Different tasks can use different underlying models depending on what the task requires and what your organization’s risk tolerance and cost sensitivity dictate.
- 🔌Plugin extensibility — including D365
- Cowork can now expose plugins for specific tasks. Plugins for Microsoft Fabric and Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and ERP apps are now GA, which means Cowork can take action grounded in your D365 data, not just your M365 productivity data. This is the development most directly relevant to ERP organizations.
- 💰New cost management controls
- GA introduced more granular cost management – tenant, group, and user-level spending limits – directly responding to the obvious enterprise concern about consumption-based AI billing running out of control. If you’re piloting Cowork, configuring these limits before rollout is not optional.
- 🤝Partner plugin ecosystem
- Nine new partner plugins are available at GA from firms including Monday.com, Morningstar, and S&P Global Energy – signaling that Cowork is positioned as an extensible platform, not a closed Microsoft-only tool.
A Practical Pilot Approach
If your organization wants to evaluate Cowork, here’s a sensible starting structure: enable it for a small pilot group (5-10 users) rather than the full tenant. Set conservative spending limits at the user level during the pilot — you can always raise them once you understand actual usage patterns. Choose pilot use cases that are genuinely multi-step and time-consuming today (variance commentary preparation, multi-source report assembly, meeting prep across several documents) rather than simple single-step tasks that don’t showcase the multi-step value proposition. Track actual Copilot Credit consumption against the value delivered, and use that data to build your broader rollout business case using the framework from Post 26.
📚 Go Deeper — Microsoft Resources
- What’s New in Copilot Cowork — Official Changelog
- Cowork GA Announcement — Including D365 CE Plugins Coverage
- Copilot Cowork Overview
Copilot Cowork’s GA is the most concretely usable development from this Build cycle for most organizations — it’s available now, it has real cost controls, and it has D365-specific plugins. The work ahead is governance discipline: set spending limits before you roll it out broadly, and pilot with use cases that genuinely benefit from multi-step autonomous execution.
BB
Bobbi Bricker
ERP Capability Lead and D365 Functional Architect at Centric Consulting. Former controller. This series reflects fifteen + years in ERP (as an end user and a Consultant) and a genuine belief that AI, used thoughtfully, makes finance and operations teams more capable — not less. Reach out with questions, pushback, or war stories from your own organizations.
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