The nature of work is changing fast. As AI and agents take on more of the execution, people have more agency than ever to unlock their ambition, direct what gets done, and own the outcomes. But most organizations are not keeping up, and the gap between what their people can do and what they are built to support is widening.
That tension sits at the center of the 2026 Work Trend Index (WTI) annual report. We analyzed trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals and surveyed 20,000 workers using AI across 10 countries. We also spoke with leading experts in AI, work, and organizational psychology. We are building Microsoft 365 Copilot with the future of work in mind, and our latest wave of Copilot helps employees, leaders, and organizations meet the moment.
AI lifts individual potential
Work is already changing at the individual level. Our privacy-preserving analysis of more than 100,000 chats in Microsoft 365 Copilot shows 49% of conversations support cognitive work—analyzing, solving, and thinking that once required deep expertise. More than half (58%) of AI users say they are producing work they could not have a year ago. And among Frontier Professionals—the most advanced AI users in our research—that number jumps to 80%.
That shift starts early. Work no longer begins from a cold start—it begins with signals and context already in motion. Microsoft 365 Copilot captures this and turns it into action, grounded in the knowledge of Work IQ and protected with Enterprise Data Protection. Copilot’s agentic capabilities take multi-step, app-native actions directly in your documents, worksheets, and presentations—helping you move from intent to outcome faster.
The people moving the fastest are those that decided where to delegate and what to own. They build systems that work on their behalf. And they reinvest the time saved to expand what they can do while staying responsible for the thinking. For example, they are looking around corners using Copilot in Outlook to proactively help manage meetings—not just schedule them once, but to manage the cadence and wind them down when necessary.
The job of every leader is to rearchitect work
The report shows that as employees move from executing work to designing it, the constraint between what their employees can do and what their organizations are built to support shifts. We found that only 1 in 4 AI users in an organization say their leadership is clearly and consistently aligned on AI. In fact, 65% of AI users fear falling behind if they do not use AI to adapt quickly, yet almost half (45%) say it feels safer to focus on current goals than to redesign how work gets done with AI.
This is what we call the Transformation Paradox: in plain and simple language, the same forces accelerating AI adoption are also holding us back.
Resolving this paradox requires a different kind of leadership: designing how work flows between people and agents across an organization. Microsoft Agent 365 is a unified control plane that keeps agents governed, observable, and secure. Agent 365 is now generally available, with new capabilities in preview to discover and manage shadow AI agents, including local agents like OpenClaw and Claude Code. Leaders must focus on defining the right outcomes and making the right judgement calls that move work forward with clarity of intent.
Every organization is a learning system
We analyzed responses from our global survey and tested a broad set of organizational, individual, and demographic factors against self-reported AI impact—whether employees say AI helps them produce higher quality work, collaborate more effectively, expand the type of work they do, and more. The result shows that organizational factors like culture, manager support, and talent practices account for more than 2x the reported AI impact of individual factors like mindset and behavior (67% vs 32%).
How organizations close the gap with Microsoft 365 Copilot
The firms that build a new operating model today won’t just move faster in the short term. They’ll build something more durable, setting themselves up to create value in ways that we can’t yet conceive of: an organization that learns faster than its competitors, compounds its own intelligence, and gets harder to catch with every cycle. Microsoft 365 Copilot brings that vision to work.
Organizations need to connect data across systems to move from isolated tasks to coordinated work. Copilot is part of the system where work happens—built into the Microsoft apps you use every day, with agentic capabilities in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, grounded in your work data and connected to the other apps you rely on. Earlier this year we introduced Copilot Cowork and today it is available on iOS and Android, so you can delegate work from your phone, pick it back up on your desktop, and keep tasks moving along the way without breaking the flow.
Connectors and plugins bring together data across your apps and systems, allowing Copilot and Cowork to better understand your business context. Custom plugins and native plugins with Fabric and Microsoft Dynamics 365 are now available in Cowork, with partner integrations available in the coming weeks, like LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), Miro, monday.com, S&P Global Energy, and more. Our first wave of federated Copilot connectors are generally available today from partners like HubSpot, LSEG, Moody’s and Notion in Microsoft 365 and Researcher. They will also be available in Excel this summer.
Get started today
Frontier Firms pulling ahead are turning everyday activities into a system of learning. Microsoft 365 Copilot brings that system into the flow of work, connecting context across people, data, and apps, while Microsoft Agent 365 brings the control needed to reuse and scale these systems across the organization. The opportunity in front of every leader and organization is to take control: to build a place where agents amplify what people can do, where human judgement stays at the center of the work that matters, and where we wall have the agency to decide what comes next. Microsoft 365 E7 is built on these foundations and is now generally available for you to get started today.
The full Work Trend Index report on WorkLab explores how this shift is already taking place.
Visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 app on your mobile device to get started.
