Lately, I’ve been trying to put all “Copilot” pieces on a mental map. That’s not as simple, which is not that surprising, but, even if I am still unable to completely untangle it, the picture is becoming more clear. Basically, it’s this:
Description: this is a possibly in-accurate capture of the relationships between Copilot, Work IQ, Cowork, credits, Seat Licenses, Declarative Agents, Copilot Chat, Custom Engine Agents, External and Internal LLM-s, and, somewhere there, you may even find the user.
But you can make some sense of it if, perhaps if you stop treating Copilot as an alternative to Claude or Chat GPT.
In that case it may start looking more like this. This still reminds the picture above, but… maybe it’s becoming easier to understand, even though I am still missing pieces there, and I’m not sure if all the connections are actually accurate. It’s work in progress.
You can look at the picture and think about whether you agree or disagree, I’m not pretending it’s 100% accurate. However, it seems to be helpful to think about what a feature is “not” in relation to the AI in general when looking at the “Copilot”.
- A lot is bundled under “Copilot” umbrella, but not everything there is related to the AI
- For example, Work IQ is not, really, AI. Sort of. It is a search engine, it is a workspace management tool, it it an MCP, it has API-s… the billing is both credit based and covered by seat licensing… BUT it is not an AI agent, it is not an AI harness, and it is not a model
- Cowork is, actually, a harness. Same as Copilot chat. However, a user can access Copilot chat AND Cowork through the chat. But it’s not necessarily that the user can access Cowork directly (this is arguably a little vague statement. Point being, Copilot chat interface is somewhat shared between those two)
- Copilot Managed Runtime – this is not AI at all. But this is where line of business applicaitons (including SPA Power Pages) are hosted. Not including the legacy Power Platform, though.
- Copilot is also not about the “models”. Models are almost external to the whole thing. Although, there are Microsoft’s own and external models
- Cowork s not licensed per seat. It’s an autonomous agent, and it requires credits to run. That said, a user needs a license first, and Cowork is running with the user’s identity
- Copilot chat can use seat licenses or credits
- Microsoft Copilot Autopilot, which is not on my diagram yet, is a somewhat different beast. It’s running exclusively on credits and under its own application identify
- The whole infrastructure is not, necessarily, geared towards API usage. The is more about billing/credits, but, considering some of the sample scenarios provided by Microsoft, if you try doing certain tasks directly through the WorkIQ API vs doing it in Copilot chat instead (using your Copilot license), you’ll pay way more
- As for the Copilot credits. Those are not “AI” credits. Those are… well, it’s the currency. Everything is Copilot, and you pay with credits (whether it actually involves AI or not)