Microsoft quits the personal AI chatbot race to refocus Copilot on work

Microsoft is merging the consumer and workplace versions of Copilot into one product for corporate customers, ceding the personal-chatbot market to OpenAI, Google and Meta. According to Bloomberg, the rebuilt assistant was announced on Friday, September 25, and will roll out in the coming weeks. In Seattle, executives previewed it for a few dozen business and technology leaders.

Two assistants become one

The product is the result of a six-month engineering effort. It absorbed the separate version built for home use and dropped marketing that positioned Microsoft as a builder of personal AI. The updated app adds in-place editing of Word and Excel documents and a rebranded always-on assistant, formerly Scout and now Autopilot.

Jacob Andreou, who leads product development of the unified app, said expectations for workplace software are shaped by people's experience with smartphone apps, and that importing consumer features “made Copilot so much better in just the last few months.”

“We're not going to build a Copilot that's like your personal companion,” said Charles Lamanna, who oversees teams working on core workplace features. “That's just not what people want from Microsoft. We help you get stuff done.”

A race lost to ChatGPT, Gemini and Muse

Two years ago, Microsoft formed separate teams to build two assistants, one for the workplace and one for the home, and put AI industry veteran Mustafa Suleyman in charge of the consumer effort. The bet quickly turned uphill: ChatGPT raced to a billion users, Google spread Gemini across Android, and comparatively few people took Microsoft up on its chatbot. In March, Suleyman handed product development to Andreou, a former Snap executive.

Microsoft's retreat coincides with the arrival of Meta's Muse, a personal assistant that acts on users' behalf and has climbed to the top of the app download charts. Andreou said many features of the personal Copilot, including tools for health questions, studying and news, carried over into the rebuilt product, while custom podcasts and an animated avatar were retired.

The numbers

Companies were paying for more than 30 million Copilot subscriptions as of the end of June, and the M365 apps bundle has about 90 million paying users. GHD, a Canadian engineering firm, started using Copilot in late 2023 with a 300-person trial and has since rolled it out to all 12,000 employees. David McLaren, who leads data and AI work there, said staff use it for call summaries, email management and client pitches. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella compared the shift to the personal computer's displacement of interoffice memos and faxes.