Introducing Umbraco AI Copilot Workspace

The RC for Umbraco AI Copilot Workspace just went out on our open release branches, so it’s time to properly introduce it.

If you’ve used Umbraco AI before, you already know Copilot — the chat sidebar that opens next to a content or media item and helps you work on whatever you have open. Copilot Workspace is new. It’s not a bigger sidebar. It’s a whole new backoffice section, built for a different kind of conversation entirely: one that isn’t tied to a single page, doesn’t forget you when you close it, and can act on more than the one item you happened to have open.

What Copilot Workspace actually is

Copilot Workspace ships as its own section in the backoffice, sitting alongside Content and Media rather than living inside them:

Persisted conversations and projects, always where you left them

A few things fall out of being a proper section rather than a sidebar:

Conversations are persisted. Close it, come back tomorrow, and your conversation is still there — with full history, not a blank slate. Pin the ones you’ll come back to, rename them, archive the ones you’re done with.
Projects group related work. In the screenshot above, “Q4 Content Refresh” is a project — every conversation for that piece of work lives under it, instead of scattered across separate chats you have to hunt down.
It has real backend reach. Create, update, publish, and unpublish tools are available here — across your whole content and media tree, not just the item you’re looking at — all mediated through human-in-the-loop approval.

Projects keep the context with the work

Open that “Q4 Content Refresh” project and you can see what makes it more than a folder — it carries its own instructions and attached resources, applied to every conversation inside it:

Brand voice instructions and a pinned resource, applied automatically to everything in this project

Set the tone once — “write in a warm, confident voice, keep sentences short, flag anything needing marketing sign-off” — attach the pages that matter, and every conversation you start under that project inherits it. That’s the difference between “help me with this page” and “help me with this campaign”: the second one needs somewhere to keep the brief, and Workspace gives it one.

Backend reach, one approval at a time

Point Workspace at a brief rather than a page — “update these five product pages with the new pricing,” “spin up a landing page for the autumn campaign” — and it can go find the right content, make the changes, and carry them out, one approval at a time:

Copilot Workspace creating a new content item elsewhere in the site with an Approve/Deny card — Backend write tools, available site-wide, still one approval per action

Because it can touch content you aren’t currently looking at, the confirmation step scales with how much is at stake. Routine changes get a straightforward Approve/Deny. Anything with real reach — unpublishing your home page, say — gets explained up front, and Workspace won’t let you approve until you’ve typed a confirmation phrase back:

Copilot Workspace requiring you to type 'Home' to confirm before it will unpublish the site's home page — The wider the reach of an action, the more friction it gets

That friction is the point, not an inconvenience — it’s what makes it reasonable to grant this much reach in the first place.

Why another Copilot add-on?

Fair question, given Copilot already exists. The short version: Copilot and Copilot Workspace are built to answer different questions, and neither one should try to be the other.

The Copilot sidebar is deliberately anchored to the item you have open. Ask it to touch anything else and it’ll tell you plainly that it can’t:

Copilot in the sidebar explaining it can only make changes to the Home page currently open, and can't edit the pricing page from here — Copilot explaining exactly where its scope ends — this page, and nothing else

There’s no tool in its hands for reaching outside the open item, let alone for backend destructive actions like publish, unpublish, or delete elsewhere — no matter how the underlying agent is configured. What it can do is drive the same frontend actions you’d click yourself, still gated behind your approval:

Copilot asking for approval before saving and publishing the currently open Home page — Save and publish, still confirmed by you, still limited to this page

That’s a deliberate restriction, and it’s exactly right for what the sidebar is for: a very capable pair of hands for the one page in front of you. It’s “help me with this page.” Copilot Workspace is “help me with this campaign” — a brief that spans several pages, or your whole site, worked through over a longer conversation with the broader access that job actually needs.

Both run on the same agent runtime and the same tool infrastructure — this isn’t two separate AI stacks. What differs is the policy wrapped around each surface: the sidebar hard-restricts destructive backend tools at the surface level regardless of agent config, and Workspace grants that backend reach but layers escalating confirmation on top of it. Same underlying Copilot you already trust, two different jobs, matched to two different altitudes of work.

Try it

Copilot Workspace is available now as a release candidate. Install it alongside your existing Umbraco AI setup, open the new Copilot section, and point it at something bigger than a single page — that’s exactly the gap it’s there to fill. As ever, it’s an RC: I’d love to hear what does and doesn’t feel right before it goes final.

Until next time 👋