Overview
On June 16, 2026, Microsoft made Copilot Cowork generally available to every M365 Copilot customer worldwide. And the headline most coverage is missing — you can now pick your AI model. Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.5 (Frontier preview), with Microsoft's own Cowork 1 coming soon. Plus new usage-based billing on top of your M365 Copilot license. Here's the honest breakdown.
✅ What Copilot Cowork actually is (it's NOT just chat Copilot)
✅ Why 50%+ of Fortune 500 were already using it before GA
✅ The 4 models you can pick — Opus / Sonnet / GPT-5.5 / Cowork 1
✅ The new usage-based pricing layer (same playbook as Anthropic's Agent SDK split)
✅ Why Microsoft picked Claude as the DEFAULT (not GPT, not their own model)
✅ 3 things to do this week if your company uses M365 Copilot
📺 Other recent breaking dev episodes:
Video Timeline
- 0:00 The thing I did not see coming
- 0:35 Wait — Microsoft is letting you pick Claude over GPT?
- 1:10 What Cowork actually is (Copilot's action mode)
- 2:00 What GA means + how to enable it
- 2:35 The 4 models — pick by task
- 3:30 The new usage-based pricing trap
- 4:25 Why Microsoft picked Claude as default (strategy)
- 5:10 3 things to do this week
- 5:45 Outro
Key Takeaways
- Practical cloud architecture patterns you can apply immediately
- Real-world implementation guidance from enterprise experience
- Azure, AWS, and multi-cloud considerations
- Security-first and cost-optimised design principles
Watch & Learn
Watch the full video above for a detailed walkthrough. Subscribe to Tech with RKM on YouTube for regular cloud and AI architecture content.
