If your team has just rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot licences, here’s an easy win that can dramatically expand what you get out of the subscription: install Cowork (Frontier), Anthropic’s Claude-powered digital coworker that runs natively inside the M365 Copilot experience.
Cowork interprets natural-language instructions, breaks them down into steps, and can run on a schedule — so it can quietly do background work for you (research, briefs, prep) while you get on with your day.
Before you start — two quick prerequisites
Cowork (Frontier) is delivered through Microsoft’s Frontier program and is powered by Anthropic’s Claude. Before any of this will work, your tenant administrator needs to:
- Enable Anthropic as an approved subprocessor in your Microsoft 365 admin settings.
- Join the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier program so Frontier-tier agents like Cowork are available to your users.
Without both of these in place, Cowork won’t appear in the agent list. Once they’re enabled, the rest takes about two minutes.
Step 1 — Install Cowork
Open the M365 Copilot app and click Search in the left-hand navigation. Type “Cowork” into the search bar.
You’ll see Cowork (Frontier) appear in the results, described as “A versatile digital coworker that interprets natural language instructions, breaks them into…”. Click it to add it to your agents list. It will then live under Agents in the sidebar, ready to use.
Step 2 — Let Cowork Help You Set Up a Scheduled Task
This is where Cowork really earns its keep. Rather than configuring schedules through menus, you can just describe what you want in plain English and Cowork will set it up for you.
Open Cowork and tell it what you’d like done on a recurring basis. For example:
“Look at my calendar for the rest of the week. For any meeting that looks like a potential project or new lead (e.g. inbound enquiries, HubSpot requests, meetings with external companies, new contacts), research the company and any named participants…”
Cowork will recognise this as something worth scheduling and reply with something like “I can set this up as a scheduled task. Quick question on timing before I do.” Tell it when you’d like it to run — for instance, “Monday mornings at 7am” — and it builds the scheduled task for you, ready to activate.
Click Activate and run and you’re done. From then on, the brief lands in your inbox before your week even starts.
Step 3 — Tweak the Schedule Any Time
If you want to change the cadence, the instructions, or pause the task, open the task from the Scheduled panel on the right and click the … menu. You can edit the schedule (Weekly, day, time), update the instructions, switch between Same session and New session run modes, and toggle the task active or inactive.
Why This Matters
Most Copilot users only ever use it reactively — asking it questions when they think to. Cowork flips that: it does work for you on a schedule, in the background, using the same Microsoft Graph context (your calendar, mail, files) that Copilot already has.
For the price of a few minutes of setup, you get a recurring research analyst, meeting prep assistant, or weekly digest writer — whatever you ask it to be. It’s one of the easiest ways to make a Copilot subscription pay for itself.