Microsoft has announced a significant expansion of Copilot Cowork, its agentic AI platform for enterprise work, bringing it to iOS and Android and introducing a new 'Skills' system that allows teams to encode their workflows into reusable AI instructions. The announcement, accompanied by the release of Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, positions AI agents not as productivity tools but as the next operating layer for work itself — a shift that Microsoft argues is already underway in the organizations that have adopted Cowork through its Frontier early-access program.

"Once AI understands your work, it can start contributing to it and working alongside you."

— Microsoft

Cowork on Mobile: Delegate from Anywhere

The mobile expansion is designed to address a fundamental limitation of the current Cowork experience: the need to be at a desk to delegate work. Cowork already runs in the cloud, meaning tasks continue to progress even when a user closes their laptop. The iOS and Android apps extend this capability to wherever work happens — on a commute, between meetings, or away from the office. Users can delegate a task the moment they think of it and return to a finished outcome, rather than waiting until they're back at their desk to initiate the work.

This capability is built on what Microsoft calls Work IQ, an intelligence layer that understands a user's data, tools, and organization. Work IQ allows Cowork to plan, act, and produce outcomes that are grounded in how a specific business runs, rather than drawing only on publicly available information.

Skills: Encoding Institutional Knowledge

The new Skills feature is perhaps the most structurally significant addition to Cowork. A skill is a reusable set of instructions that guides Cowork on how to complete a task or workflow — capturing not just what needs to be done, but how a specific team or organization wants it done. Microsoft is introducing built-in skills for common workflows like creating documents, coordinating meetings, and conducting research, while also allowing organizations to create custom skills that encode their own processes, standards, and conventions.

The long-term vision is for skills to become a shared layer of institutional intelligence — a way for organizations to scale how work gets done without losing the tacit knowledge that currently lives only in the heads of experienced employees. As Cowork learns from how a team completes tasks, those patterns can be formalized into skills that any team member can invoke, effectively democratizing access to institutional expertise.

New Integrations and the Xbox Retreat

On the integration front, Microsoft is connecting Cowork more deeply to its own product suite, including Fabric IQ with Power BI and Dynamics 365 across sales, customer service, and ERP applications. New third-party connectors are coming for LSEG, Miro, monday.com, and S&P Global Energy, with more planned.

In a notable counterpoint to the enterprise AI expansion, Microsoft also announced that Copilot AI will not be coming to Xbox consoles. Xbox CEO Phil Spencer confirmed the decision, which follows months of criticism about Microsoft's handling of Copilot integration across its product portfolio. The retreat from gaming suggests that Microsoft is sharpening its focus on enterprise and productivity use cases, where the value proposition for AI agents is clearest.