Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot

Having helped OpenAI bring ChatGPT to the world, Microsoft bet its own consumer assistant could win over a new set of customers. It quickly became an uphill battle. Photo by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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Microsoft Corp. is merging the consumer and workplace versions of its Copilot AI assistant into one product aimed at corporate customers, ceding the crowded market for personal chatbots to OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and, now, Meta Platforms Inc.

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At an event in Seattle earlier this week, Microsoft executives gave a few dozen business and technology leaders a preview of what they’re calling the new Copilot. The result of a six-month engineering effort, the latest iteration of the assistant has absorbed the separate version for home use, adopting some of its slick design features, and casting aside the marketing that sought to position the company as a builder of personal AI.

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People have high expectations for workplace software, informed by their experience with smartphone apps, Jacob Andreou, who leads product development of the unified Copilot app, told the audience of corporate customers on Wednesday. Importing some user experience features from the consumer app “made Copilot so much better in just the last few months,” he said.

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Microsoft’s individual users, Andreou added, tend to be people who like to poke around in PowerPoint and Excel, and are more interested in “the full power that we offer to enterprise users” than a simplified chat app.

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The updated software, announced on Friday, gives users the ability to edit Word or Excel documents within a Copilot app or browser tab, addressing a common gripe that Microsoft’s assistant had only limited reach into the company’s own productivity software. There’s also a tab for a coding assistant to enable regular users to put together dashboards or automate tasks. Microsoft’s Scout, an always-on assistant that coworkers can summon, is joining the Copilot package too, rebranded as Autopilot.

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The new Copilot, which will roll out in the coming weeks, brings to a close one of Microsoft’s biggest bets of the AI era. Two years ago, executives formed separate teams to build two assistants — one for the workplace and one for home. Having helped OpenAI bring ChatGPT to the world, Microsoft bet its own consumer assistant could win over a new set of customers and tapped AI industry veteran Mustafa Suleyman to lead the effort.

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It quickly became an uphill battle when ChatGPT sprinted to a billion users and Google deployed its Gemini personal assistant to the vast Android ecosystem. Comparatively few people took Microsoft up on its offer of a personal chatbot. Suleyman in March ceded his Copilot product development responsibilities to Andreou, a former Snap Inc. executive.

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Microsoft’s retreat coincides with the arrival of Meta’s Muse, a personal assistant that can act on users’ behalf and has raced to the top of the app download charts.

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In interviews this week, Andreou and Charles Lamanna, an executive who oversees Microsoft teams working on some of Copilot’s core workplace features, said Muse’s success proved people were receptive to AI automation. Microsoft’s opportunity, they said, is to bring similar capabilities to office workers.