Microsoft Combines Its Two Copilot AI Apps and Drops Several Features
Microsoft is combining its everyday-user Copilot app with its business-focused Microsoft 365 Copilot app, turning two separate products into one. The company is also removing several features that were aimed at regular consumers and retiring Mico, a small animated character shaped like a floating blob that served as a friendly face for the assistant. TechCrunch
The features being cut were mostly social or experimental. Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts, Copilot Labs experimental features, and a tool called Deep Research will all be removed by August 18, 2026. Microsoft will offer a replacement for Deep Research called Researcher, but only within Microsoft 365 Copilot and only for paying professional users. Files created in the standalone Copilot app will be moved to OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud storage service. TechCrunch
Microsoft executive Jacob Andreou, who oversees Copilot, wrote in an internal memo that the Copilot app needed to "earn the right to exist in customers' lives." That language suggests the company knows the consumer version of Copilot has not yet become useful enough to keep people coming back on its own. TechCrunch
The features being removed tell a story about where Copilot tried to do too much. Group Chats and AI-generated podcasts assumed people wanted to gather socially around an AI assistant. Copilot Labs was a testing ground for new ideas. Deep Research was an ambitious research tool now being folded into a paid professional feature called Researcher. The pattern is a step back from broad consumer experiments toward a tighter focus on work-related tasks. Microsoft Support Microsoft Support
Mico, the animated character, is also being retired. The floating blob was meant to give Copilot a friendly, approachable personality in the consumer app. Removing it fits the broader merger: the combined product will focus on Microsoft 365's work-and-productivity identity rather than a separate consumer personality. Microsoft Support
This merger comes about three and a half years into Microsoft's Copilot effort. The company introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot on March 16, 2023, building the assistant into Word, Excel, and other Office applications. Microsoft Blog That came ten days after the introduction of Dynamics 365 Copilot on March 6, 2023, which Microsoft described as the world's first AI assistant for customer-management and business-planning software. Microsoft Blog The Copilot name has since spread across Microsoft's products, including Dynamics 365 Contact Center, announced June 4, 2024, which uses AI to handle customer service interactions. Microsoft Blog
Microsoft had also explored the social side of Copilot. In October 2025, the Microsoft Copilot Blog published a piece titled "Human-centered AI" describing efforts to measure how well AI handles social situations, including how it improves group chats, encourages creativity, and grows conversations. Microsoft Copilot Blog Less than a year later, the company is now retiring the very features that research described.
What remains for everyday users is narrower. Microsoft's consumer Copilot page keeps Copilot Vision and Recall as separate features with different purposes. Microsoft Copilot The Copilot Voice feature disappears when a conversation ends, rather than staying on in the background. Microsoft Copilot These are practical tools for getting things done, not social or experimental ones.
The broader context here is about bringing Microsoft's consumer and business AI tools together. By merging the two Copilot apps, Microsoft is betting that a single assistant connected to its Microsoft 365 software suite is more useful than keeping a separate consumer brand. Moving standalone-app files to OneDrive is the mechanical bridge between the two. Replacing Deep Research with Researcher for paying users is the functional one. Andreou's language about earning the right to exist suggests the company recognizes that Copilot's consumer experiments did not attract enough ongoing use to justify keeping them alive on their own.
If your workplace pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot, the merged app brings the consumer experience into the professional one. If you used the standalone Copilot app for personal files, those files are being moved to OneDrive. Deep Research is going away, and Researcher takes its place for licensed users. The deadline for feature removal is August 18, 2026, which is five days from now.
This is a pruning cycle, not a retreat. Microsoft is not pulling back from Copilot as a product. It is narrowing the consumer side to match the work-focused identity that the business version already has. The animated character, the social group chats, the AI podcasts, and the experimental sandbox are being cleared away to make room for a more focused tool. Whether that focus earns Copilot the lasting place in people's lives that Andreou referred to will depend on how well Microsoft executes in the months ahead.
