Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork globally — an agentic AI that independently drafts documents, builds spreadsheets, and sends emails. Pay-per-task at $0.01/credit. And Gartner just published the IT 2030 archetypes showing what happens to IT teams when this scales.
Copilot Cowork — The Details
4 inputs
Model + context + tools + runtime
Models available:
Anthropic Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.5 (Frontier tier). DeepSeek V4 coming as low-cost option.
First pricing model change at Microsoft in nearly two decades.
This isn’t Copilot chat — it’s a full agentic system. It independently carries out complex, multi-step tasks: drafting documents, building spreadsheets, sending emails, analyzing data, operating across Microsoft 365 apps without human intervention between steps.
Gartner: What This Does to IT by 2030
Gartner’s IT 2030 archetypes show five paths for IT organizations as agentic AI scales:
IT 2026 (baseline) 100 FTE
Today’s IT. Full headcount. Manual processes.
Lean IT 70 FTE — smaller, more efficient
Same demand, fewer people. AI handles routine work.
Amplified IT 30 FTE — enterprise demand grows
IT keeps same capacity but with 70% fewer people. AI does the heavy lifting.
Democratized IT 30 FTE — business DIYs more
Business users do their own IT with AI tools. IT team shrinks to infrastructure + governance.
Gartner’s range: from 100 FTE down to 30 FTE — or up to 150 FTE but redefined as builders. Either way, the traditional IT worker doing manual tasks is the role that disappears.
The Supercycle Connection
Copilot Cowork at $0.01/task + Gartner’s IT 2030 = the AI Supercycle’s FRED Test in action. Tasks with high Frequency, Repeatability, Error tolerance, and Decomposability get automated first. Drafting, spreadsheets, emails — these score maximum FRED. Copilot Cowork just priced them at a penny each.
Business Engineer
The AI Supercycle — FRED Test + Mutation Map
Which tasks get automated first? Which companies survive the pricing shift? The framework for reading both.
The Bottom Line
Microsoft just priced agentic enterprise work at $0.01 per task. Gartner shows that by 2030, IT teams shrink from 100 people to 30 — or transform into 150 builders. The traditional knowledge worker doing routine tasks is being repriced out of the equation. Not in theory — in production, at scale, this week.