Cowork Reporting Is Here. Now We Need Better Insights.

The reporting tools for Copilot Cowork are starting to light up. You can track usage (including grace period credit consumption for Frontier tenants) and an interface has arrived for Cowork access and credit requests.

This is great. But to understand the value driven by spending on Cowork, a far more granular level of reporting will be needed. It's hard not to look at these reporting panes and wonder if they were created before the very public falling out enterprises like Meta or Amazon have been having with initiatives that have incentivized tokenmaxxing.

There are three things I'd like to see that would help us to understand Cowork value and plan interventions to support its delivery:

1️⃣ Report based on job size. Microsoft has established the "light", "medium", "heavy" profile of Cowork tasks, the budgeting tools are based on that understanding. We need to be able to see this in our reports (anonymized and securely) to understand if that budgeting picture holds.

2️⃣ Let us drill down to per-job spend. Understanding the range of use will be helped by admin-level visibility of what end-users can derive from /cost. Without this specificity the shape of use will remain underdefined.

3️⃣ Aggregate usage patterns across Copilot and Cowork so we can understand how big a part of someone's AI usage is steered into Cowork. We need to establish the right capability floor for Cowork under which Copilot is the appropriate default, but without visibility into how users choose to use either product, it's not possible to know where to target those interventions, or how they are performing.

It's early days yet but Microsoft has imposed a very short timeline on its entire Copilot customer base to start to plan for these issues. The reporting needs to rapidly iterate to take us from usage stats that feel like a tokenmaxxing leaderboard to one that helps us determine real value. Activating billing for Cowork is the easy step, making the value of the spend provable is going to be far harder.

📢 Do you want to find out more about Cowork Billing, what it means for your spend, and how to get it set-up correctly? I'm hosting a webinar on Wednesday June 24 that will include all this information. See the link in the comments for more details.

First posted on Linkedin on 07/03/2026 → View Linkedin Post Here