Personal Agent Bench

Microsoft Copilot Tasks, the consumer agent that is changing its name

Copilot Tasks is the agent feature of Microsoft's consumer Copilot: you describe a goal in plain language, and Copilot plans the steps and carries them out with a computer and browser of its own, once or on a schedule. Microsoft announced it in February 2026 as a research preview, opened it to personal Microsoft 365 subscribers, and now says those users will be moved to Copilot Cowork. We have not tested it and we have not taken it apart. It sits on the landscape list as recorded, so this page sets out what Microsoft and others have published, who said each part, and what we would still need to find out.

  • Copilot Tasks is a consumer feature for personal Microsoft accounts. It is not the Copilot Cowork that businesses license, and it is not the enterprise agent Microsoft now calls Autopilot.
  • Microsoft's help page says it asks for approval before payments, account changes, actions involving other people, and sending personal information to outside sites.
  • The same page says personal-account users "will begin to be migrated to Copilot Cowork over the next few weeks." The page carries no date.
  • Microsoft has published no price for Tasks itself. Nothing on this page is a measurement of ours.

What Copilot Tasks is, in Microsoft's words

The launch post on Microsoft's consumer Copilot blog, Copilot Tasks: From Answers to Actions, is dated 26 February 2026 and credited to the Copilot Team. Its pitch fits in one line: "Copilot Tasks is a to-do list that does itself." It describes AI "that doesn't just talk to you, but works for you," and says the feature is designed for everyone, not only developers or enterprises.

The post's examples are domestic rather than corporate. It lists nightly email triage with draft replies, a weekly apartment search that books showings, a Monday briefing on meetings, turning a syllabus into a study plan, tailoring a resume to a job listing, comparing plumbers and booking one, rebooking a hotel when the price drops, and cancelling subscriptions you no longer use. It also says you do not have to configure agents or MCP servers yourself.

One practical note on the source. Opening that post's address with our fetching tools returned Microsoft's AI at Work blog index instead of the article, so we read the post through the blog's own published data feed, which gives the same title, date and text.

Thurrott, in a piece by Laurent Giret the next day, framed it as Microsoft bringing agentic AI to its consumer chatbot. Giret relays the announcement and the sign-up link and does not describe using the product.

Several other write-ups of the launch, including PCWorld, Neowin and eWeek, returned errors to our tools. We have not used anything from them.

How Copilot Tasks works: a computer, a browser and your connected accounts

Microsoft's current help page is the most detailed first-hand description. You describe a goal in natural language and Copilot plans and carries out the steps. There are two kinds of task: regular tasks that run once, and scheduled tasks that run at set times or on a recurring schedule. All of them live in a Tasks view in Copilot, where you can monitor, pause, stop, edit a schedule or delete a task.

For tasks that need the web, the help page says Copilot clicks, scrolls and types on sites, and that you can watch, stop or take over. It also uses "connected services you've authorized (such as email or cloud storage)." The page does not name specific services. It does not say Outlook, Gmail, OneDrive or Google Drive, and we are not going to fill that gap with a guess.

The launch post adds where this happens: the agent works in the background "with its own computer and browser" and reports back when it is done. That puts Copilot Tasks in the cloud-agent column of the split our where it runs page draws across the category. The machine doing the clicking is Microsoft's, not yours.

The help page is also candid about limits. It says Tasks may not work well for highly sensitive or critical activities, for advanced document design, or on "Websites that restrict automated interaction," and that Copilot may ask you to take over when a site blocks it.

What Copilot Tasks asks before it acts

The help page lists the categories where Copilot asks for your approval first:

  • monetary transactions
  • submitting personal information to external websites
  • actions involving other people
  • account-altering actions
  • sensitive actions

It also says tasks "will not start without you specifically asking to start a Task," and that you can stop a running task at any time. The launch post makes the same promise in shorter form: Tasks "is designed to ask for consent before taking meaningful actions," with spending money and sending messages as the examples, and it calls Copilot a collaborator rather than autopilot.

Those are statements of intended behaviour. They tell you what Microsoft has committed to in writing. They do not tell you what the approval prompt is attached to, whether it shows the exact amount or message before you agree, or what happens when a site phrases a purchase as something else. A published policy and an observed one are different kinds of evidence, and only the second would go on our scorecard.

Who can use Copilot Tasks, and what it costs

The launch post described a limited research preview for a small group, with more people to be added before a broad launch and a waitlist at copilot.microsoft.com/tasks/preview. Thurrott's write-up says the same.

The help page now names its audience directly. It applies to personal Microsoft accounts with Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium or Pro. Work and school accounts are not on that list. The page does not mention preview status, usage limits, credits, regions or languages.

On price, there is less than the search results imply. Neither the launch post nor the help page gives a cost for Tasks. Thurrott wrote at launch that it "wouldn't be surprising" if Tasks became a paid feature after the preview. That was a guess. The help page now ties Tasks to those Microsoft 365 plans, but we found no Microsoft page that puts a figure on Tasks itself.

Moving from Copilot Tasks to Copilot Cowork

The change most people searching for Copilot Tasks will run into is the rename. Microsoft's help page says personal-account users "will begin to be migrated to Copilot Cowork over the next few weeks." Microsoft's Copilot app updates page gives the details, and they matter more than the new name.

  • Cowork for personal accounts is in preview and is a Premium or Pro feature. The page says: "If you have a Personal or Family subscription, you will lose access to Cowork." You can still view old Tasks conversations.
  • Tasks conversations move, but "memories saved by Tasks won't."
  • Scheduled tasks move but are switched off by default.
  • Existing shared links to Tasks responses and Tasks-created content will stop working.
  • Text and email channels for reaching Tasks are not available in Cowork.
  • Files are saved to OneDrive, and documents, presentations and apps become Copilot Pages.

Read together, the help page and the updates page say something the headlines do not. Copilot Tasks currently lists Personal and Family subscribers, and its successor, for now, does not include them.

Microsoft's getting-started page for Cowork on personal accounts describes what the move lands on. Cowork "carries out tasks on your behalf" in the browser at m365.cloud.microsoft, in the Microsoft Copilot desktop app and in a Cowork mobile app. Its listed abilities include creating and editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files, drafting and sending email, managing a calendar and OneDrive files, research, daily briefings, scheduled prompts, and browser tasks you can watch, stop or take over. It says you review and approve sensitive actions first. The page calls the product a prerelease that may change substantially, and it gives no usage limits or pricing for personal accounts.

None of these pages gives a date for when the move starts or ends. We will update this page when Microsoft does.

What Copilot Tasks keeps about you

The help page has a data section, which is more than many products in this category publish. It lists task history, screenshots taken during browser tasks, optional cookies, memory specific to a task, and data from connected services, accessed only as needed.

On retention, it says "Screenshots are retained for a limited time and are not used for training." Cookies are encrypted and kept for up to 30 days. Other logs are kept for "limited periods," with no number given. It says "Copilot does not store sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers" and similar details.

Two further lines are worth reading before you connect an inbox. The page says some interactions may be reviewed by people and automated systems for product improvement and safety. And it says users signed in with a Microsoft account can control whether their activity is used for model training.

The memory question loops back to the migration. Tasks keeps memory per task, and the updates page says those memories do not move to Cowork. If you have been relying on Tasks to remember something, plan on telling the new product again.

Copilot Cowork at work, and Autopilot, are different products

Microsoft uses the Copilot name for a lot of things, and two of them get confused with Copilot Tasks.

The first is Copilot Cowork for organisations. Microsoft's general availability post, signed by Charles Lamanna on 16 June 2026, describes Cowork for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers. It requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot user licence, is switched off by default, and is enabled by tenant admins. It is billed on usage in Copilot Credits, with pay-as-you-go priced at $0.01 per credit, and the price of a task depends on model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. That post does not mention consumers, personal accounts or Copilot Tasks. The personal-account Cowork that Tasks users are moving to shares the name, but the pricing above is for business tenants.

The second is Autopilot. Jared Spataro's post of 25 September 2026 introduces it as the new name for what Microsoft had called Scout: a cloud-hosted, persistent agent with its own identity and workspace inside an organisation's tenant, which you can @mention in Teams and Outlook. It was expanding to a private preview at the end of September. The post is written for work customers, and it does not mention Copilot Tasks or personal accounts. Microsoft's own launch post for Tasks, by contrast, insists the feature is not autopilot.

So if you arrived here with a work account, the product you can use is probably Cowork through your company, and this page is mostly not about it.

Why Copilot Tasks has no score here

Copilot Tasks is not in our exam and we have not taken it apart. Our landscape entry records it with its sources, and that is all. The same is true of OpenAI Dots and Poke, which have pages of this kind, and of Grok Bot, which is in the exam but has not been opened.

It is also worth saying what is missing from the public record. We could not find an independent hands-on account of Copilot Tasks that publishes task-level results. Every's comparison of personal agents, which we have relied on for other pages, does not cover any Copilot product. The coverage we could open relays Microsoft's announcement.

When a product has been through the process in how we take them apart, it gets a page with the other teardowns. A blank here is not a low score. It is a blank.

What a teardown of Copilot Tasks would have to answer

These are the questions that would change a reader's decision, roughly in order.

What the agent can actually reach once an inbox and cloud storage are connected, as opposed to what the help page lists as categories. Whether the approval prompt for a payment shows the exact amount and payee, and whether an account change that does not look like one still triggers it. What a task-specific memory contains, and whether you can read or correct it before it is discarded. Whether the scheduled tasks that move to Cowork behave the same once switched back on. And whether an instruction planted in a connected email, from someone you have never met, can steer a running task.

With the migration under way, the honest answer may be that Copilot Tasks will never be tested in its own name. If that happens, the questions transfer to Cowork for personal accounts, and so does this page.

FAQ

What is Copilot Tasks? A feature of Microsoft's consumer Copilot that carries out goals you describe in plain language. According to Microsoft, it plans the steps, works in the background with its own computer and browser, uses accounts you connect, and can run once or on a schedule.

Is Copilot Tasks free? Microsoft has not published a separate price. The help page lists it for personal accounts with Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium or Pro, and says nothing about credits or usage limits.

Is Copilot Tasks being replaced by Copilot Cowork? Yes, for personal accounts. Microsoft says those users will begin moving to Cowork over the next few weeks. Conversations move, task memories do not, and scheduled tasks arrive switched off.

Will I keep access if I have Microsoft 365 Personal or Family? Microsoft's app updates page says Cowork for personal accounts is a Premium or Pro feature, and that Personal and Family subscribers will lose access to Cowork while still being able to view old Tasks conversations.

Is Copilot Tasks the same as Microsoft 365 Copilot or Autopilot? No. Microsoft 365 Copilot and its Cowork feature are licensed to organisations and billed by usage. Autopilot is an enterprise agent formerly called Scout. Copilot Tasks is for personal Microsoft accounts.

Have you tested Copilot Tasks? No. It is not in our exam, it has no score, and we have not taken it apart. Everything here is attributed to Microsoft or to a named outlet.