Microsoft scales back its bet on Copilot as a mass-market personal AI assistant
Microsoft is changing its Copilot development strategy and merging the consumer and work versions of the AI assistant into one product with a stronger focus on corporate users and work tasks.
This was reported by Bloomberg. According to the agency, the company is effectively abandoning its previous attempt to compete directly with ChatGPT, Gemini and other services for the role of a universal personal AI companion.
Microsoft spent about six months merging the two separate Copilot lines. Previously, the company was simultaneously developing an assistant for work and a standalone consumer product designed for everyday use.
Now the consumer version will be integrated into a single Copilot. At the same time, Microsoft will keep some features created for regular users, including specialized tools for study, information search and other tasks. The company is removing some experimental features, including personalized podcasts and an animated avatar.
One of the leaders of the Copilot division, Charles Lamanna, told Bloomberg that Microsoft does not intend to build a product in the format of a “personal companion.” According to him, the company's main goal is to create tools that help users perform specific work.
The updated Copilot will receive deeper integration with Microsoft office applications. Users will be able to edit Word documents and Excel spreadsheets directly in the Copilot app or in a browser tab. The interface will also include a separate tool for working with code, which will allow creating simple applications, data dashboards and automating tasks.
The platform will also include the always-on AI assistant Scout, which Microsoft is renaming to Autopilot. It will be available to perform tasks from Teams and email.
The updated version of Copilot will begin rolling out in the coming weeks.
The strategy change comes amid significantly faster growth of competing consumer AI services. ChatGPT has taken a leading position among mass-market chatbots, Google is actively integrating Gemini into the Android ecosystem, and Meta is stepping up promotion of its own AI assistant.
Microsoft already has a large corporate base for developing Copilot. According to Bloomberg, by the end of June companies were paying for more than 30 million subscriptions to the service. The most functional Copilot features are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers, whose paid user count is about 90 million.
Two days before the report on the Copilot restructuring, Microsoft also unveiled an updated AI strategy for business. The company is betting on integrating various AI models into work applications, corporate data and autonomous agents capable of performing long-running tasks.
Microsoft emphasizes that it does not intend to tie the corporate Copilot to a single model. The platform should support technologies from different developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and companies will be able to choose models depending on the specific task.
