What Copilot Cowork Means for Enterprise IT

Your enterprise IT team has most likely spent the last couple of years governing Copilot’s assistant capabilities, but that very model is about to become insufficient.

With Copilot Cowork, Microsoft’s initial AI positioning focuses on tasks like answering questions, drafting emails, scheduling meetings, organizing calendars, etc. Long story short, Cowork is a massive shift that re-aligns the way IT’s responsibilities are viewed.

But, first things first. What is Copilot Cowork? It’s Microsoft’s flagship agentic AI tool that can perform various functions across Microsoft 365 on a user’s or an enterprise’s behalf.

How does this happen? An AI agent executes tasks within your systems at scale, increasing productivity exponentially. The stumbling block? Organizations need to evolve in order to handle this level of AI adoption.

Addressing this ‘Plan to Action’ Loop

To understand why strong governance is required, you need to understand how Cowork operates. When a problem or request is communicated by the user, Cowork structures it into tangible steps before starting to execute the entire sequence.

Since the process is isolated and sandboxed, tasks across devices are executed without a pressing need for the user to stay active.

When predefined milestones are reached, Cowork pauses and waits for approval before broad changes are applied. Vague actions are not carried out without checking in with the user first. This ability to distinguish between layers and offer a degree of autonomy is what separates Cowork from previous iterations of Copilot.

This is also precisely where the governance challenge takes shape. Earlier, mistakes were around human actions like sending an email, and tracing the person responsible was straightforward.

When it comes to an AI agent, the actions are so fast and diverse that traditional system frameworks just cannot trace them backwards. Let’s come back to this once we take a look at Cowork’s contemporary capabilities.

A Look at Cowork Today

Cowork’s current task categories encompass tons of knowledge-based work with minimal fuss. Here’s a look at some of the tasks it can handle seamlessly:

• Managing your calendar end-to-end, right from schedule review and meeting alignment, to adding complete focus blocks and milestones whenever they’re required.
• Prepping you for high-level meetings, especially pulling data from previous conversations to make the conversation pertinent, relevant, and highly efficient.
• Posting updates across communication channels, creating impactful company-wide documents, etc
• Managing end-to-end launch workflows for your internal features – This includes valuable competitor research, elevator pitch decks, and ownership segregation.

The common thread across these activities is evident: Cowork is not waiting for a human command to take action. Rather, it uses its own insights and information to take relevant actions.

That’s exactly why the implications of these are significant. A single user, with Cowork enabled on his or her system, can run multiple tasks at the same time across systems.

Now, take that and multiply it across thousands of users in a mid-level enterprise, and you get an overwhelming amount of independent or autonomous AI actions happening at any given point in time.

Traditional IT monitoring is simply not possible here, as it was primarily built for human speeds. Cowork operates at a much higher velocity, and this leads to risk that MUST be managed. Closing this gap requires teams to first establish a broad-level chart of which users have Cowork enabled, and what data the corresponding tasks touch.

The Solution: What IT Actually Needs to Know In Terms of Governance: The Claude Angle

Cowork is built on the same technology and agentic framework as Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. The pertinent thing here is that Microsoft’s strategy is to select the most capable model for each layer of execution required by the user. This makes the data governance angle straightforward. Why? Your organization has no direct contract with Anthropic, as it’s listed as a sub-processor in Microsoft’s data agreement.

Microsoft is your only POC. All Cowork activity is within the purview of your Microsoft tenant, meaning no change in governance boundaries, even though the model itself has been upgraded.

Closing this Gap with CloudFuze

With Microsoft’s purview and logs acting as excellent guardrails to govern activity within your tenant boundary, the real gap is what’s OUTSIDE. What does this mean? It’s what people using these agents can do (that misfires), rather than what the tool itself does.

Consider this scenario: You bring Cowork into your organizational activities and then:

• Custom agents are built by your employees without review, resulting in a nightmare for IT monitoring
• Agents that get deployed but then are left in limbo when they’re no longer used: However, they still have access to sensitive data

The catch? None of these scenarios triggers an actual compliance alert by default. They only gather over time, and before you know it, the problem has compounded significantly. This is precisely the type of governance gap you should look to avoid by extensive workforce training and proper communication.

Delving into Dedicated Governance Layers

Platforms like CloudFuze Manage can help you close this gap by offering a wide view across the gap we looked at, providing a consolidated view of each agent operating within your organization. The key, however, is frequent review and communication within internal teams. This is how this can play out:

• Every agent you use is surfaced, including external tools, with complete vendor and model details tied to the employee using them
• Agents are constantly validated against certain factors like scope, data access, information exposure, etc
• Conversations are scanned periodically for financial info and shared credentials, whether willingly or inadvertently.

With CloudFuze Manage, you can achieve all these and much more. It equips your organization to deal with agent visibility on a much larger scale than previously thought. This can prove to be the crucial USP you need to achieve true governance. Intrigued? Let’s have a chat.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who governs Cowork’s data?

As far as Cowork is concerned, Microsoft is the sole point of contact. Anthropic is only a sub-processor, which means all customer activity stays within Microsoft’s purview.

2. I run an enterprise. What governance risk could I potentially face with Cowork?

The real risk isn’t Cowork itself, since this is covered by Microsoft’s boundary. However, make sure you have guardrails on employees creating their own agents, and previously used agents still having access to critical company data.

3. How exactly is Cowork an upgrade on previous versions of Copilot?

The key difference lies in magnitude and efficiency. While previous versions of Copilot were adept at drafting content on demand and answering questions, Cowork can understand a goal and create the steps and sequence behind it on its own.