Microsoft reorganizes its AI strategy around a single Copilot app
Microsoft is consolidating its scattered Copilot products into one unified app, a shift that reflects a more disciplined and independent approach to building AI after its early reliance on OpenAI.
Microsoft is consolidating its many Copilot products into a single unified application, a move that marks a quiet but significant change in how the company builds and delivers artificial intelligence. The reorganization reflects a more disciplined, independent strategy that has taken shape over the past year, as the company works to stitch together efforts that once ran on separate tracks.
For much of the early generative AI boom, Microsoft benefited from its investment in OpenAI, which gave it a strong start in the market. Satya Nadella, the company's chief executive, cautioned in a 2023 interview with Fast Company that early leads in technology do not matter much in the long run. The partnership with OpenAI later grew increasingly fraught, and the agreement has since been revised in ways that make it less central to Microsoft's AI future. The company has not had to start over entirely, but it has been building its own path forward.
Jacob Andreou, executive vice president for Copilot, described the situation inside the company before the change. Different groups had been working on pieces of the technology in their own worlds, he said, and the past year and a half has been about bringing those pieces together. Andreou joined Microsoft in February 2025, a former Snap executive and Greylock partner, to work on the consumer version of Copilot. At that time, the consumer edition had its own team and product roadmap, separate from the version built for business users. Roughly a year later, the company reshuffled its AI leadership to create a single Copilot super app, comparable to the unified experiences offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Andreou now oversees that app.
Charles Lamanna, a 13-year Microsoft veteran, took on a new role as executive vice president of Microsoft Copilot, Agents, and Platform. Lamanna has said the new app will mark the end of what he called Copilot-palooza, the period in which the company released many products bearing the Copilot name. In his description, there is now one Copilot for personal and work life, one Copilot across chat, code, cowork and autopilot, and one Copilot that appears in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The interfaces may differ, he said, but the system works as the same Copilot behind the scenes. Various aspects of the new app are in private preview for members of Microsoft's Frontier program, and no date has been announced for general availability.
The changes arrive as Microsoft's influence over software development is already substantial. According to a recent Stack Overflow survey, 71 percent of developers work in its Visual Studio Code environment. More than 225 million programmers store their work on GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018. Its general-purpose platforms are larger still, with Microsoft 365 reaching more than 500 million users and Windows 11 surpassing a billion. One study cited in the reporting found that 42 percent of developers use generative AI to produce at least half their code.
Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer for almost a decade, framed the broader shift in terms of tools. Scott recalled a long debate among woodworkers over whether using power tools undermined a craftsman's legitimacy, and he said software engineers today are taking a more pragmatic view of generative AI. People more clearly understand that it is just a tool, Scott said, and it is not particularly useful unless someone asks it to do a useful thing in a useful way. Microsoft has long held to the idea of using its own products, a principle it coined in the 1980s as eating your own dog food. That approach, the company suggests, is what it is now applying to AI as the industry works out how to make the technology both practical and profitable.
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