General availability is not a soft milestone — it is the moment liability, SLAs, and procurement conversations become real. Copilot Cowork's worldwide GA means enterprise compliance teams can now assess it against existing vendor contracts rather than waiting for a stable product surface. That shift is consequential in a market where Microsoft's AI positioning has been shadowed by questions about its OpenAI dependency. The Google Home Speaker's Gemini-first framing — announced the same week — shows how competitors are racing to ship integrated AI products at the consumer layer; Microsoft's Cowork answers that race at the enterprise layer, where the purchasing cycle is longer but the lock-in runs deeper. The stack Microsoft is building — its own models, its own agents, its own agentic platform — is now a product, not a partnership story.
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