For me, 2026 has certainly been the year of the agents. With my knowledge worker hat on, Claude Cowork changed everything. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, although it was a harder recommendation to make to clients already fully committed to Microsoft.

Fortunately, Microsoft then partnered with Anthropic to bring us Copilot Cowork. The terrible product naming continues.

What really excited me was the prospect of building agents that could act as coworkers, supporting staff and helping them get the job done faster and to a consistently high standard. For clients bound within Microsoft 365, Copilot Studio seemed the obvious place to do this.

Unfortunately, it was a frustrating experience. I’d feel like I was making progress, only to find the end result underwhelming or unsatisfactory. Having seen what I could achieve with tools like Cowork and Codex, I was starting to wonder whether I’d need to recommend that clients consider an enterprise account with Anthropic or OpenAI to take full advantage of the very real capabilities which agents bring.

But Microsoft have once again been beavering away in the background. The new GitHub Copilot harness in Copilot Studio has levelled the playing field, and then some. Announced for general availability on 3rd August, Ryan Cunningham, who leads Copilot Studio for Microsoft, admitted in a LinkedIn post that this new way of building agents had the “same powerful engine behind Copilot Cowork”. No wonder it now works!

A harness is the software around the AI model that organises its work. It gives the model access to information and tools, manages what happens as it works through a task, and allows it to act on what it finds.

The older Copilot Studio experience was more geared towards conversations and explicitly defined rules and paths. It could already use tools and knowledge, but the newer harness gives the agent more scope to work out the steps, use the appropriate tools and adjust its approach as it goes. It brings together skills containing reusable instructions, access to knowledge and connections such as Work IQ, which lets it draw on information across Microsoft 365.

In the work I’ve tried since, the results have felt on a par with what I could build using Anthropic or OpenAI’s tools. I’m now much more confident about offering these solutions to clients.

In fact, I’d go further: I’d now recommend Microsoft as the place for most businesses to build their AI foundations, whatever their size and whether or not they’re already using Microsoft 365. The quality of the agents, together with access to business information through Work IQ, makes that a compelling proposition. I think the future looks very bright for Microsoft here. At the beginning of this year, I wouldn’t have expected to be saying that.