Microsoft Copilot Home: What It Is and How to Set It Up
Key takeaway: Copilot Home is the redesigned entry point to Microsoft 365 Copilot, rolled out from September 2026. It unifies the Chat and Cowork experiences into a single hub and embeds full versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint directly in the interface, so users can go from a prompt to a finished document without switching apps. Setting it up is primarily a licensing and policy exercise done in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
In This Article
What Is Copilot Home?
Copilot Home is the new default landing experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot, available at microsoft365.com/copilot and from the Copilot button in the Microsoft 365 app launcher. Microsoft began rolling it out to commercial tenants in September 2026 as a replacement for the previous scattered Copilot entry points, the standalone BizChat interface, the Copilot panel inside individual Office apps, and the separate Copilot web experience were all consolidated into a single hub.
The design philosophy behind Home is simple: instead of requiring users to know which Copilot to open for which task, everything starts in one place. You can ask a question, draft a document, analyze data, and share results, all without leaving the Copilot interface. For organizations that have been frustrated with user adoption because employees didn't know where to go, Home directly addresses the discoverability problem.
Chat vs. Cowork: What's the Difference?
Home presents two primary modes, accessible from the left navigation pane:
Chat is the conversational AI interface, equivalent to what was previously called BizChat or Microsoft Copilot in Teams. Users ask questions, request summaries, draft emails, or search across their Microsoft 365 data (email, calendar, Teams messages, SharePoint documents). Chat is grounded in the Microsoft Graph, meaning Copilot can reference your actual organizational data rather than just its training corpus, subject to your permissions and policies.
Cowork is the collaborative canvas mode. It provides a persistent, shareable workspace where AI-generated content can be built up over time, similar in concept to Notion or Confluence pages, but driven by AI prompts. Users can create a Cowork page, add AI-generated text, tables, and embedded documents, and share it with colleagues. The key difference from Chat is that Cowork output is structured and persistent, not just a conversation thread.
Pages: Within Cowork, the content unit is called a Page. A Page can contain a mix of AI-generated prose, embedded Office files, and manually edited text. Pages are stored in the user's OneDrive and are shareable like any OneDrive document. Administrators should Pages are subject to standard OneDrive DLP and retention policies.
Built-In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
The most significant change in Copilot Home is that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now embedded directly within the Copilot interface. In previous iterations, the flow was: prompt Copilot in BizChat → receive output → export to Word → continue editing in Word. The context switch was a friction point that reduced adoption.
With Home, the editing canvas lives inside Copilot. When you ask Copilot to draft a proposal, the Word editor opens in a pane alongside the chat. Changes you make in the document can be immediately fed back to the Copilot chat ("add an executive summary section above what you just wrote"). Excel sheets, PowerPoint decks, and Word documents all open in this embedded mode. Files are saved to OneDrive or SharePoint exactly as they would be from the standalone Office apps, there is no new file type or separate storage location.
This embedded experience requires the full Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Users with only Microsoft 365 E3/E5 without the Copilot add-on will see the apps open in a new browser tab in the traditional experience rather than embedded inside Home.
Licensing Requirements
Copilot Home is available to users assigned a Microsoft 365 Copilot license (the add-on that was previously called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" at $30/user/month). It requires an underlying Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium subscription. Copilot is not available on F1/F3 (Frontline Worker) plans.
- Microsoft 365 E3 + Copilot add-on, full Home experience including embedded apps
- Microsoft 365 E5 + Copilot add-on, same, plus Copilot has access to Purview compliance data signals
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium + Copilot add-on, supported; some enterprise features may be limited
- Microsoft 365 E3/E5 without Copilot add-on, no Copilot Home; users see the standard Microsoft 365 app launcher only
Note: The Microsoft 365 Copilot license is a per-user add-on. Purchasing it for a subset of your organization is supported and common, you do not need to license every user. Unlicensed users will not see Copilot Home in their app launcher.
How to Enable Copilot Home (Admin Setup)
Copilot Home is enabled automatically for users who have the Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned. There is no separate toggle to turn on "Copilot Home", the experience follows the license. That said, there are several admin controls worth configuring before rolling out to users.
In the Microsoft 365 admin center (admin.microsoft.com), go to Billing → Licenses, select the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on, and assign it to the target users or groups. License assignments can also be done via Microsoft Entra group-based licensing or PowerShell (Set-MgUserLicense). Allow 24 hours for the Copilot Home experience to appear for newly licensed users.
Navigate to Settings → Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center. This is where Microsoft surfaces the primary admin controls for Copilot: optional connected experiences, web search grounding, and plugin/connector management. Review each setting against your organization's data handling policies before users start prompting.
By default, Copilot can reference any Microsoft 365 content the licensed user has permission to access, email, Teams messages, SharePoint, OneDrive. If your organization has sensitivity labels or DLP policies protecting certain content, verify those policies are applied before rollout. Copilot respects label-based access controls; it will not surface content the user cannot access directly. Administrators can also restrict Copilot from accessing specific SharePoint sites using the SharePoint admin center.
Copilot can supplement Microsoft Graph responses with Bing web search results. This is controlled under Settings → Copilot → Web Search. For organizations in regulated industries (healthcare, finance, government), you may want to disable web search to prevent Copilot from pulling external information into responses about internal matters. For most commercial organizations, web search grounding is a useful default that improves response quality for general knowledge questions.
Copilot interactions are captured in the Microsoft Purview audit log under the CopilotInteraction activity type. Ensure unified audit logging is enabled for your tenant (it is on by default for most plans but verify under Compliance portal → Audit). Audit retention follows your standard retention policy, 90 days for E3, 365 days for E5, or longer if you have Purview Audit Premium.
How Users Access It
Once licensed, users access Copilot Home from three places:
- microsoft365.com/copilot, direct URL, bookmarkable, works in any browser
- Microsoft 365 app launcher (waffle menu), Copilot appears as a pinned app once the license is assigned; users may need to click "All apps" to find it initially before it surfaces in their top apps
- Teams sidebar, the Copilot app in Teams opens into the same Home experience; users who live in Teams all day often prefer this entry point
Users do not need to install anything. Copilot Home is fully browser-based. The Microsoft 365 desktop apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) also retain their own Copilot panel for users who prefer working directly in the desktop app rather than through the Home hub.
Data Governance and Compliance Considerations
Copilot Home surfaces a broader slice of organizational data than earlier Copilot experiences, because Chat and Cowork both ground responses in the Microsoft Graph. Before deploying to sensitive teams, confirm:
- Oversharing in SharePoint, Copilot will surface documents the user has permission to access. If SharePoint permissions are loose ("Everyone" or broad group access), Copilot can retrieve documents users technically have access to but may not know exist. Run a SharePoint permissions audit before Copilot rollout if your governance is inconsistent.
- Sensitivity labels on documents, Copilot respects sensitivity label access controls. If confidential documents are properly labeled and protected via Microsoft Purview, Copilot will not include them in responses for users without the required label-based permissions.
- Pages and Cowork output, Pages created in Cowork are stored in the user's OneDrive. Apply DLP policies that cover OneDrive if you want to prevent Pages containing sensitive AI-generated content from being shared externally.
- EU Data Boundary, Copilot respects the Microsoft EU Data Boundary for tenants in the European Union. If your organization is EU-based, verify your tenant region in the admin center under Settings → Org settings → Organization profile.
Rollout Tips for IT Teams
The most successful Copilot Home deployments we have worked on follow a few consistent patterns:
- Start with a pilot group. License 20–50 users across departments before broad rollout. Gather feedback on what they are prompting, what is not working, and what data access surprises arise. This surfaces permission gaps and training needs before they affect hundreds of users.
- Fix SharePoint permissions first. If your SharePoint governance is loose, Copilot will expose that immediately. Run the SharePoint permission reports before your pilot and clean up broad "Everyone" grants on sensitive sites.
- Create prompt guides for each department. Copilot is significantly more useful when users know what to ask. A one-page prompt guide for HR ("summarize all emails from this person over the last 30 days"), Finance ("build a monthly expense summary from these attachments"), and Legal ("draft an NDA based on our standard terms") drives immediate adoption better than any training session.
- Don't skip the audit log review. After two weeks of pilot use, pull the CopilotInteraction audit log and look at what data is being accessed. It almost always reveals a permission or labeling gap you didn't know existed.