Charles Lamanna is moving Microsoft Copilot beyond chat

After seeing how coders have been delegating large parts of their jobs to AI, Charles Lamanna wants office workers to start doing the same. Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive VP of agents and business apps, heads Copilot Cowork, which lets workers hand off complex tasks to AI agents that hook into Microsoft’s 365 suite. While it’s still in a limited research preview, Cowork allows them to do things like build competitive analyses from internal Excel spreadsheets or weed out scheduling conflicts using context from Outlook. “The thing which has really blown us away is how sophisticated the scenarios are that people are already doing on it,” Lamanna says. Office workers had already been using features within Copilot to build their own automation tools, Lamanna says. Cowork is meant to further streamline the process, so workers can just describe what they want and come back to a completed task. He believes this kind of delegation will soon replace the constant back-and-forth prompting of traditional artificial intelligence chatbots. Over the last six months, he says, AI has improved at handling complex, multistep instructions without getting confused. It’s also gotten better at choosing among tools, such as web browsing, checking a calendar, or writing an email, to accomplish a task. “2026 is probably going to be the year where we move past chat as the main thing we think about when it comes to AI, particularly AI at work,” he says. There are still obstacles in the way of that vision. Lamanna says it will take time for businesses to change their workflows, and agent use can get expensive quickly because of the number of AI tokens involved. But if Microsoft can push AI agents deeper into the Office empire, Lamanna believes it could change the nature of work while still leaving room for human judgment. “The agents are incredible,” he says, “but the agents can’t automate a full job.” This profile is part of Fast Company’s AI 20 for 2026, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AI’s most influential technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers.