Microsoft Is Combining Its Copilot AI Into One App That’s Easier to Ignore

Microsoft is also deleting the Copilot Podcasts feature, if you care about that.

After letting Copilot colonize Windows 11, Microsoft is congregating a few of its disparate ends of the Windows AI experience into one place. This call to prayer for Copilot may help users enjoy their work and pleasure chatbots in one place. It may also help the less AI-hopeful to ignore Copilot entirely.

The new Microsoft Copilot app

For this merger, Microsoft is starting with the commercial and consumer ends of its Copilot experience. On Thursday, the Washington-based tech giant declared the Microsoft 365 Copilot and regular Copilot apps would do their best Vegeta and Goku impression and fuse into one “Microsoft Copilot” app. The new application will receive a distinct, though entirely familiar, icon.

The company wrote in a support document that the new app will be “a simpler, more cohesive experience.” This is the first push for the so-called Copilot “super app” built for Windows 11. All the web and mobile Copilot apps will merge sometime in the next few weeks. We’ll have to wait until mid-September for the Windows and Mac apps to change over.

As an all-in-one experience, you’ll be able to access some common Microsoft 365 programs, like Word and Excel, through the Copilot app.

Deleted and disrupted features

With this change Microsoft is also deleting some capabilities you may have forgotten were even there:

• The Podcasts and Deep Research features are going the way of the dodo starting Aug. 18.
• All your Copilot Group Chats will not carry forward into the new app.
• Other Copilot components, like Shopping and Copilot Health, may see disruptions while Microsoft brings all the disparate AI functions into one place.

Microsoft did not say explicitly what will happen to the Copilot key found on most modern Windows PC keyboards, but we assume it will instead open the new Copilot super app.

The idea behind this move is to put the chatbot and image generation capabilities in the same place where you’re expected to use the app for notetaking or drafting company emails. You’ll still have to switch between personal Microsoft accounts and your EntraID information.

Two ways to look at it

There are two ways to look at this move. One is that Microsoft is expanding Copilot so that it is an all-in-one experience, no matter if you’re using it for work or fun. The other is that Copilot will now be less fragmented and suffused throughout the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft claimed back in April it has over 20 million paid Copilot enterprise customers. That means those are companies with potentially thousands of employees all forced to use the AI, whether they want to or not. But it’s never enough. Google claimed this week that Gemini has over 1 billion monthly active users. To justify their spending on the AI buildout, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and every other big tech firm need to show people are using the chatbots for work and non-work alike.