Microsoft ( MSFT ) is bringing Entropic’s ( ANTH.PVT ) cloud computing to its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI platform. Called Copilot Cowork, the service, which Microsoft says it developed in close collaboration with Anthropic, can perform tasks on behalf of enterprise users, such as creating presentations, extracting data into spreadsheets in Excel, and emailing colleagues to schedule meetings.
The update arms Microsoft with an AI platform that broke into the software-as-a-service industry last month, sending shares of startups like Salesforce ( CRM ), ServiceNow ( NOW ), Thomson Reuters ( TRI ), and Intuit ( INTU ) plunging.
And while they’ve recovered some of those losses, stocks are still down after the January 30th Entropy crash.
For Microsoft, the update adds agentive capabilities to its existing AI offerings, expanding the overall usefulness of Microsoft 365 and driving more enterprise options.
The company says it continues to see success in AI sales, with paid Microsoft 365 seats growing 160% year-over-year in the most recent quarter and daily active usage increasing 10x.
“Development is also accelerating as the number of customers on a significant scale – more than 35,000 seats – triples annually. Just last week, Mercedes-Benz announced the global rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot, said NASA, Fiserv, ING, the University of Kentucky, Introward Inc., the University of Manchester, the United States Department of Introvert, and the U.S. Department of Introvert. In the statement.
In addition to Copilot Cowork, Microsoft announced that it is bringing new agentic AI functionality to Microsoft 365 Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It also includes a very powerful copilot chat.
The company also said that its Microsoft Agent 365, an AI agent monitoring and governance platform, is now generally available for $15 per user per month.
Toss together all of Microsoft’s 365 offerings, including Microsoft Intra and Microsoft Copilot 365, and you’ve got the company’s Microsoft 365 E7 suite. It costs $99 per user per month, less than buying the entire service on its own, the company said.
Microsoft and its fellow hyperscalers Amazon ( AMZN ) and Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ) are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI data centers, along with social media giant META ( META ), and while Microsoft has its own cloud business through which it sells cloud computing and AI capabilities, its customers also have remote access to the company’s products.
And Wall Street was particularly concerned about whether Microsoft would successfully monetize its massive AI investments in its cloud services and software offerings.
