Microsoft, Anthropic, and Notion reshape the AI assistant as a unified workspace

A super app replaces the Copilot toolbox

Microsoft has shipped a Copilot super app that brings together conversational chat, the autonomous Cowork agent, a redesigned coding environment called Code, and the persistent agent previously known as Scout (now Autopilot). The company said users will describe what they want to accomplish without choosing a mode, with Copilot routing the task to the right capability. Separately, Microsoft is embedding Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly inside Copilot so that office work can happen without leaving the AI surface.

The combined effect is that knowledge workers no longer have to pick between Copilot Chat, a coding pane and Office — they live in one window, and the routing is automatic. For practitioners, this collapses several daily context switches into a single handoff to the assistant.

Coding inside the assistant becomes a first-class surface

The new Code environment inside Copilot is Microsoft’s response to standalone AI coding tools and is bundled into the same super-app shell. Code replaces the older Copilot coding experience and shares authentication, files and context with the chat and agent layers. For developers and analysts who already keep documentation, tickets and code in Microsoft 365, this means less time copying snippets between a browser tab and the assistant, and more time describing the change they want in plain language.

Anthropic opens a marketplace for Claude agents and connectors

Anthropic launched a Claude Marketplace that consolidates more than 2,000 plugins, connectors and agents in one place, with contributions from Atlassian, Google, Microsoft, Notion, Salesforce and others. The marketplace also lets customers buy Claude-powered products from partners such as CrowdStrike, Cursor, Harvey, Legora, Lovable and Snowflake. For buyers, this turns Claude from a single chatbot into a procurement surface: teams can standardise on one vendor and pull in specialist agents from third parties rather than negotiating separate deals for each tool.

Notion 3.7 standardises and ports agent workflows

Notion released version 3.7, which introduces Agent Skills — reusable instructions maintained as Notion pages in a dedicated library. To avoid lock-in, skills can be exported as portable SKILL.md files, and a new Agent Skills API lets developers load skills from Notion in spec-compliant formats so they can be synchronised between tools. Custom Agents can also call other Custom Agents as sub-agents. The practical effect is that teams can write a workflow once in Notion and move it into another runtime that understands the SKILL.md convention, which matters for any organisation hedging its bets across assistants.

An open-source office SDK reaches 1.0

DreamNum shipped Univer 1.0.0 on September 24, followed by two patch releases within eight hours the same day. Univer is an Apache-2.0 SDK that embeds spreadsheets, documents and slides into other software, and the 1.0 release drops Uniscript, a feature that sent custom formula code over RPC for remote execution, on security grounds. Founder Liu Yang previously led Feishu’s spreadsheet team and built the earlier Luckysheet project. For product teams building AI-augmented editors, Univer 1.0 offers a self-hostable alternative to the closed surfaces that Microsoft and Anthropic are pushing.

Excel adds multi-value cells, but a Microsoft 365 update is paused

Microsoft Excel is rolling out previews of lists, in-cell arrays and nested arrays so a single cell can hold multiple values without collapsing them into a text block. The features are currently in Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels, and Microsoft warns the behaviour may change before general availability and recommends against using them in important workbooks at this stage. In a separate change, Microsoft paused KB5002907 — titled “Optional update for out-of-date Microsoft 365 Apps installations” — after users reported that it deactivated, or in some cases removed, perpetual Office 2016 and Office 2019 installations.

IT teams managing mixed estates should track the pause and confirm license state on Windows PCs running Current Channel or Monthly Enterprise Channel before reapplying the update.