[AI UNRAVELED SPECIAL] Microsoft’s "Fire and Forget" AI: Copilot Cowork and the New $99 E7 Tier

Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI, they already deployed

one.

It's called chat-concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping using self-reflection and layered

reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps

schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trading value, advanced,

intuitive, and deployed.

That's how they stack.

It's technology at Capital One.

Welcome to AI Unraveled, your daily strategic briefing.

It is Monday, March 9th, 2026.

I'm your host, Etienne Newman.

Today's special is sponsored by Jamga Mind.

If you want to skip the ads and get this intelligence straight to your ears, click the link in our

show notes for our premium Jamga Mind feed.

For years, we've used co-pilot as a research assistant.

Today, Microsoft changed the job description.

With co-pilot co-work, AI is becoming an autonomous agent that lives in your calendar and

email, executing work for hours in the background.

We are unraveling the fire and forget revolution.

The new agent 365 governance platform, and why the $99 E7 tier is the new gold standard

for the modern office.

Let's get into the news.

Picture this.

You are sitting at your desk and staring at a screen that just feels like a wall of demands.

Oh, yeah.

We have all been there.

Right.

You have an overflowing inbox, a calendar packed with overlapping, and let's be honest, mostly

unnecessary meetings.

Totally unnecessary.

And to do list that is just completely out of control.

Now, I want you to imagine a world where instead of rolling up your sleeves and diving

into that mess, you could just tell your computer, handle it.

Just handle it.

Exactly.

And then you actually walk away to get a coffee.

Not just ask it a question or have a draft an email for you to review, but genuinely

hand off the workload and trust that it will be done.

It sounds like magic, honestly.

It really does.

But welcome to the deep dive.

Today, we are looking at a stack of incredibly timely sources that suggest this scenario

isn't science fiction anymore.

We are pulling from a brand new CNET article published today, March 9, 2026, by Caitlin

Chadraui.

It's titled AI Agents at Work.

Microsoft Copilot is getting its own version of cloud co-work.

And we also have a targeted briefing we are looking at on the dawn of autonomous copilot

co-work.

And it is a profound shift we are talking about today.

Our mission with this deep dive is to explore how Microsoft's latest updates are transforming

artificial intelligence from a needy chatbot into an autonomous digital colleague.

A real colleague.

Right.

We are going to uncover exactly what this means for the future of your white collar workflow,

the underlying strategy shaking up the tech world right now.

And the day-to-day reality of sitting down at a desk to work in this completely new paradigm.

Okay, let's unpack this.

Because if you have been using AI at work over the last couple of years, you know that

it often feels a lot like, well, baby sitting.

Yes.

Baby sitting is the perfect word for it.

I'm actually borrowing that term directly from Charles Lemanna.

He's Microsoft's president of business apps and agents.

He pointed out that up until now using AI meant guiding it step by step.

You had to hold his hand.

Exactly.

You read a prompt.

It spits out an answer.

You correct the answer.

You ask it to format the data differently.

You check it for hallucinations.

I mean, it is helpful.

Sure.

But you are still very much in the driver's seat.

The cognitive load was still entirely on the user.

You're essentially acting as a middle manager for an intern who met well, but.

It completely lacked broader context.

Exactly.

What Microsoft just announced represents a fundamental break from that model.

They are introducing a massive new feature called co-pilot co-work.

And the defining characteristic here is autonomy.

Real autonomy.

Right.

This is designed to independently complete multi-step assignments without any human supervision.

It has access to your files, your emails, your calendar.

It can autonomously create spreadsheets, run reports, do research.

Neil and Shadrawi's CNET article mentioned a wild real-world test of this by Lamana

himself.

He handed over three months of his executive schedule to co-pilot co-work to clean up.

Three whole months.

Yeah.

How did the AI actually handle an executive's calendar without making an absolute mess

of it?

It's fascinating because it didn't just look for empty time slots or obvious double

bookings.

The AI cross-referenced his vast email history, past calendar data, and internal organizational

structures.

So it was actually reading his old emails to understand the context of the meetings.

Yes.

To actively determine which of those upcoming meetings were actually unnecessary for him

to attend, it evaluated his practical importance to every single meeting on the docket.

Wait, hold on.

Offloading a spreadsheet formatting task is one thing, but letting an AI decide which

meetings to skip, what about the social friction there?

Oh, the politics of it.

Right.

If I'm an executive and a bot declines a meeting with a sensitive client or a key stakeholder,

isn't that a massive risk?

How does it know the political nuance of who it can brush off?

That is the exact hurdle that has kept these systems as mere chat bots until now.

But the AI isn't just bluntly deleting calendar blocks in the dark.

It presented Lamanna with a highly visual, easy-to-read chart of its recommendations first.

Oh, OK.

So he got to review it.

Right.

It categorized which meetings to keep and which to drop, providing the rationale for each.

He reviewed this chart, and once he gave the green light, the execution phase began.

The fire and forget phase.

Exactly.

The AI autonomously declined the meetings, and even attached AI-written meeting notes were

necessary, explaining why he wasn't attending or summarizing what his input would have been

based on his previous emails on the topic.

So it handled the social graces on the way out the door.

The CNET piece noted this entire process took the AI about 40 minutes to run in the background.

Lamanna described it as delightful and practical, noting it saved him and his executive assistant

hours of tedious calendar management time.

Time they could immediately redirect toward more important strategic duties.

It is a profound psychological shift for the worker.

We have spent the last few decades learning how to interact with software by being the

operator.

Right.

You click the buttons, you drag the cells and the spreadsheet.

Exactly.

Now you are stepping back and becoming the orchestrator.

You are managing outcomes rather than managing processes.

Lamanna summarized this by saying co-work is the new chat, calling it a fire and forget

model.

You launch the request and you forget about it until the finished product is on your desk.

Here's where it gets really interesting though, because the underlying tech reveals a very

unexpected twist in the corporate AI race.

The sources emphasize that Microsoft didn't build co-pilot co-work in a vacuum.

They built it in direct collaboration with Anthropic.

That is a massive detail.

It's so much shocking.

Microsoft is famously the primary backer of OpenAI, the creators of chat GPT.

And yet here they are partnering deeply with Anthropic, one of OpenAI's biggest rivals,

to build a flagship economist feature.

It even feels similar to Anthropic's own quad co-work.

It's fascinating here is Microsoft's strategic positioning.

They are effectively playing Switzerland in the AI wars.

Neutral territory.

Right.

They are choosing not to pick a side in the growing few between these major AI startups.

Instead, they are positioning co-pilot as the ultimate neutral ground, the foundational

operating system for work.

They are making new models from both Anthropic and OpenAI available within co-pilot.

It is like they are saying, we don't care which engine you prefer, as long as you are

driving our car.

And they are building a massive highway system for all these cars to drive on.

Which brings up a huge point about access and cost.

We need to analyze this new E7 bundle pricing mentioned in the briefing.

Yes.

The $99 a month tier.

Exactly.

$99 a month.

Is this the end of the $30 a month cheap AI era?

It really looks like it.

Because you are no longer paying for a tool that helps you type faster.

You are paying for a digital employee that executes workflows in the background.

The value proposition is entirely different now.

Which is a perfect time to pivot for a second.

Because as AI moves from your sidebar directly into your calendar, the complexity of managing

these digital employees skyrockets.

It becomes a full-time job just tracking them.

Absolutely.

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It cuts through all the noise.

Definitely.

And getting back to managing all these digital employees, this leads us to the May 1st

launch mentioned in our sources.

Microsoft is rolling out general availability for a platform called Agent 365.

This is critical for enterprise.

If I have employees spinning up dozens of these autonomous bots to handle their emails and

sprint sheets, how does a company actually manage that chaos?

That is precisely the problem Agent 365 is designed to solve.

Right now, Copilot Co-Work is in a limited research preview.

But as we move toward full deployment, IT departments need a way to govern this massive

influx of digital labor.

They need visibility.

Exactly.

Agent 365 is the enterprise platform designed to oversee, secure, and manage all of these

autonomous agents.

You have to monitor what data these bots are accessing, how much compute power they are

burning through, and ensure they aren't accidentally leaking proprietary information while

trying to be helpful.

Microsoft actually released an internal metric that is staggering.

They have already created more than half a million AI agents internally using Agent 365.

Half a million?

Half a million.

What are all those agents actually doing?

It gives you a sense of the scale we are approaching.

It won't be one generalized agent per person.

It will be dozens of highly specialized microagents.

Oh, I see.

Like a swarm of them.

Yes.

You might have an agent dedicated solely to monitoring a specific competitor's press releases

and summarizing them every Friday.

Another agent might live entirely inside your expense software automatically cross-referencing

receipts with corporate policy and flagging anomalies for human review.

Another handles your scheduling.

I want you, the listener, to really imagine your workplace in just a few short months.

Picture logging in on a Monday morning.

You aren't just checking your own task list or collaborating with your human co-workers.

You are opening up a dashboard to oversee a literal fleet of your personal digital agents.

Your own personal team.

Right.

You are checking to see what data they pulled, what emails they drafted, and what workflows

they executed in the background over the weekend.

It is an entirely different paradigm of what it means to be a white collar professional.

And if we connect this to the bigger picture, we have to look at how the broader market

is reacting to this paradigm shift.

Because this isn't happening in a vacuum.

No, it definitely isn't.

While executives are thrilled about the efficiency gains, the macroeconomic implications

are causing serious shockwaves.

Major tech stocks actually took a noticeable hit at the end of January, directly catalyzed

by anthropics AI developments.

All street is realizing that agentic AI is becoming increasingly capable of replacing

traditional software products altogether.

Let's drill into that for a second.

Replacing software.

Not just helping you use software faster, but replacing the need for it entirely.

How does an AI agent actually kill a software company's business model?

Think about traditional software as a service, or SAWS companies.

You pay a monthly subscription for an expense management platform or a project management

tool.

The main value of that software is giving you a user-friendly interface to input, categorize,

and extract data.

Right.

You pay for the dashboard, basically.

Exactly.

But an autonomous agentic AI doesn't need a user interface.

It can simply read the raw data files, apply your company's complex business logic, and

generate the final output entirely autonomously.

So the entire middleman, the software interface you had been paying $30 a month for, becomes

completely obsolete.

The AI just bypasses the dashboard and does the work directly on the raw data.

Exactly.

We're seeing this with tools like Cloud Co-Work and also with models like OpenAI's Codex,

which is specifically designed to understand and generate computer code.

Codex can autonomously write the scripts needed to connect two different databases together,

completely eliminating the need for expensive integration software.

That is why Wall Street is spooked.

The foundational business model of thousands of SAWS companies is suddenly at risk.

That is a massive structural threat.

And if Wall Street is panicking about software companies losing their grip, the average

worker is looking at this and feeling a very different, very personal kind of anxiety.

Job security.

Exactly.

The briefing notes that many workers are increasingly terrified about having their jobs outright

replaced.

We've seen very real AI-centric layoffs recently at massive resource rich companies like Amazon

and Block.

The fears are rooted in visible corporate actions.

Our role is to look impartially at the data in these sources, and the reality is that

the fire and forget philosophy changes the math on human capital.

It really does.

If a suite of agents can handle the calendar management, the initial data synthesis and

the routine reporting, a company simply does not need as many entry-level or mid-level

employees to keep the gears turning.

The executives are saving time, but the workers are wondering if they're the ones being forgotten.

And then there is this other layer that completely blew my mind when reading the CNET piece.

It is what we can call the productivity paradox.

This is the truly counterintuitive part.

Let's say you are one of the people who keeps your job.

You get to use these AI agents to handle the grunt work.

You'd think your life would get infinitely easier right.

If the bot is doing my spreadsheets and declining my useless meetings, I should be working

a four-day week and logging off at 3pm.

You would certainly assume that.

But the source is highlight a highly counterintuitive finding.

These are showing that for those who keep their jobs, AI might actually make their work

days longer and noticeably less enjoyable.

Let's really dig into that paradox.

Why on earth would work become harder if a digital agent is doing half of my tasks for

me?

This raises an important question about the nature of the tasks we actually perform throughout

a typical day.

When you eliminate the low-level routine tasks, the administrative busy work, what are

you left with?

Just the hard stuff.

Exactly.

You're left exclusively with high-level, complex, emotionally demanding, or deeply strategic

tasks.

The kind of work that requires intense human focus, creativity, and problem-solving.

So my days of quietly formatting Excel cells for 30 minutes while listening to a true

crime podcast to rest my brain are officially over.

Completely over.

Instead of having those mental breaks where you just zone out on an easy task, you're

expected to eight solid hours of pure high-value strategic thinking.

That sounds utterly exhausting.

The cognitive load of constantly operating at that strategic peak is immense.

Furthermore, management's expectation of human output calibrates to the new baseline.

Oh, right.

Because the floor has been raised.

Exactly.

If an AI can do the baseline data processing instantly, then the human's quota for strategic

output goes up exponentially.

It transforms the nature of your workday from a manageable mix of easy and hard tasks

to a relentless marathon of deep work.

And on top of that, you now have the added stress of constantly monitoring and managing

a fleet of digital agents to ensure they aren't making autonomous mistakes.

So what does this all mean?

I want to speak directly to you listening right now.

Like any major technological revolution, the technology itself is neutral.

It's the implementation that matters.

Absolutely.

So your specific company and how you as an individual choose to integrate these autonomous

tools will entirely determine your reality over the next few years.

Are these tools going to genuinely give you your Friday afternoons back to spend with

your family?

Or are they just going to bury you under a completely new type of management stress where

you are frantically overseeing 50 bots that are turning out data 24-7 while your boss expects

double the strategic output?

We are right at the inflection point where those operational decisions are being made.

The source is emphasized that 2026 is truly shaping up to be the year of agentic AI.

We are moving past the novelty of text generation and into the era of background execution.

Time for a quick recap of everything we just covered in this deep dive.

We are witnessing the massive shift from needy chat bots you have to babysit to autonomous

fire and forget agents like Copilot co-work.

We looked at the huge milestone coming up in May 1st with a general launch of Agent

365 allowing IT departments to manage sprawling fleets of these bots.

And don't forget the $99 E7 bundle shift.

Right.

The end of the cheap AI era.

We also explored Microsoft's brilliant dual alliance playing Switzerland by integrating

both open AI and anthropic models to build a neutral platform.

And finally, we discussed the very real palpable tension happening right now.

Wall Street panicking over AI replacing traditional software and the productivity paradox

where workers face a grueling new standard of continuous high-level strategic output.

The transition from human operation to AI delegation is no longer a future concept.

We are seeing this accelerate rapidly, not just in corporate software, but with open-source

projects like OpenClaw.

Oh, yeah.

OpenClaw is fascinating.

For those who haven't seen it, it's essentially a free community-built framework that lets anyone

build and deploy these autonomous agents on their local machines.

This transformation is moving faster than almost anyone predicted.

The agentic era is literally knocking on your office door today.

It is here.

And as we wrap up today's deep dive, I want to leave you with one final, provocative

thought to mull over, something that builds on everything we have talked about with these

autonomous systems.

Let's hear it.

If your co-pilot co-work agent is independently analyzing your inbox, finding the meetings you

don't really need to attend, and autonomously declining them with an AI-written note.

And your colleagues are simultaneously using their own AI agents to try and schedule those

very same meetings based on what their bots think is strategically important.

At what point does the modern white collar workflow just become two algorithms negotiating

with each other in the background while the humans just sit there and watch?

That is a wild thought.

Think about it.

Until next time.

That concludes our special report on Microsoft's agentic pivot.

The signal for today is delegated autonomy.

We aren't just prompting anymore.

We are managing.

This episode was made possible by JamgaMind.

If you found this technical deep dive valuable, but want to skip the ads next time, join our

premium JamgaMind ads free feed on Apple podcasts.

I'm Etienne Newman.

Until tomorrow, keep on rambling the future.

And before you go, if your company is building the tools that power the workflows we talked

about today, I'd love to showcase them to this audience.

We don't just run ads, we build technical simulations that prove your value.

Let's build something together.

Visit JamgaMind.com slash partners to get started.

Until next time, keep building.

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