| General assistant chat |
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| Embedded in the office suite |
Word, Excel and PowerPoint add-ins |
Its core strength |
Excel, Word and PowerPoint add-ins; Outlook in beta |
Via connectors, Microsoft 365 included |
| Grounding in company data |
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Through Graph |
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With citations and per-file grants |
| Custom agents or assistants |
GPTs and workspace agents |
Copilot Studio |
Skills |
The central concept |
| Model choice and bring-your-own model |
Own models only |
OpenAI and Anthropic models; bring your own through Foundry in Copilot Studio |
Own models only |
Any provider with an OpenAI-compatible API, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter or a local model |
| Agentic multi-step workflows |
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Cowork, Researcher and Agent Mode |
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As durable tasks |
| Developer tooling |
Codex |
Agents Toolkit and SDK; GitHub Copilot sold separately |
Claude Code |
Shell, Git, SDK, CLI, browser control |
| Persistent memory across sessions |
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At platform level rather than per user |
| Background and scheduled work |
Tasks |
Scheduled prompts and Copilot Studio triggers |
Cowork scheduled tasks and Claude Code routines |
Durable across deploys, and scheduled |
| Multi-agent orchestration |
Subagents in ChatGPT Work and Codex |
Child and connected agents in Copilot Studio |
Subagents, workflows and agent teams |
Panel, pipeline, triage, debate, map-reduce, delegation trees |
| Human approval gates on tool calls |
Admins set per-app action limits and ask-before-write permissions |
Per-tool approval in Copilot Studio agents |
Admins set "Needs approval" per connector and tool, by role |
Per-tool policy, dual control, SLAs |
| PII redaction before the model sees it |
|
DLP blocks sensitive content; no redaction |
Redaction; DLP blocking in beta |
On by default |
| Internal app building |
Canvas |
Frontier |
Artifacts with storage and connectors |
App Studio |
| Broad third-party integrations |
|
100+ connectors, Power Platform and MCP |
|
146 reviewed connectors plus 8 first-party anchors |
| Versioned shared workspace |
Shared projects |
SharePoint |
Shared projects, not versioned |
Versioned |