Microsoft is folding its two AI assistants into one product. GeekWire first reported the plan to merge them, and Microsoft’s support documentation confirms the details. The consumer Copilot app and the business-focused Microsoft 365 Copilot will share a single home.
A deadline of August 18 removes several capabilities from the consumer app, including Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts, Copilot Labs experiments, and Deep Research. Professional users get Researcher as the replacement for the last one. The Mico mascot, a floating blob frequently compared to Clippy, is retired too, and files created in the stand-alone app move to OneDrive.
Microsoft calls the target a simpler, more cohesive experience, but the cutbacks read as an admission that the two-app strategy confused users and weakened Copilot against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Executive vice president Jacob Andreou told staff in July, per The Information, that the app needed to earn the right to exist and had to drop features that did not work.
Rivals are consolidating along the same lines. Cowork is now part of Claude’s Chat app, Operator lives inside ChatGPT, and Gemini bundles deep research with web browsing.
The bet behind the merger: one lean app can become the default AI workspace for personal and professional tasks where two overlapping products only competed with each other.
