According to TechCrunch and GeekWire, Microsoft has begun combining its consumer Copilot app and the business-oriented Microsoft 365 Copilot app into a single product, and is retiring a batch of AI features that failed to find an audience.
Starting August 18, 2026, consumers lose access to Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts, the experimental Copilot Labs features and Deep Research. Also going is Mico, the animated blob introduced less than a year ago to accompany Copilot's voice mode. Microsoft expects the character to survive in some of Copilot's education features.
What replaces what
Deep Research, which browsed the web and assembled long reports, gets only a partial substitute. A similar tool called Researcher will be available to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers, a tier above the Personal and Family plans. Those subscribers can still open old reports from chat history and save them to Word, but cannot generate new ones.
Group chat threads, their messages and any images created in them disappear after August 18. AI-generated podcasts must be downloaded individually from the podcast library before the cutoff. Files that Copilot generated or received will migrate to OneDrive, where additional storage requires a paid plan.
The merged product will simply be called Microsoft Copilot, with a refreshed icon. The commercial web address moves from m365.cloud.microsoft to copilot.cloud.microsoft, with automatic redirects beginning in late August. Personal and work accounts remain separate inside the app: Microsoft says data will not flow between them, employers cannot see personal activity, and enterprise security, compliance and administrative controls are unchanged.
Groundwork for a Super App
GeekWire reported that the merger lays the structural foundation for the Copilot 'Super App' that chief executive Satya Nadella has promoted to developers and investors, which will fold Copilot's chat, AI coding, the Cowork tool and new AutoPilot agents into one place. Nadella told investors on the company's July 29 earnings call that it would ship this quarter, meaning by the end of September.
The rollout is gradual. Migration began with a small group of Windows Insiders, expands to mobile and web in mid-August, and reaches Windows and Mac apps in mid-September. Some features, including Copilot Health, may be temporarily unavailable during the transition. IT departments get a small trap door: organizations that excluded the old Copilot app from Windows Recall screenshots will need to apply that setting again, because the exclusion does not carry over.
An admission about scale
The consolidation is being driven by Jacob Andreou, the former Snap executive Nadella placed in charge of Copilot in March, when Mustafa Suleyman moved to a narrower role focused on developing new AI models. In an early-July memo to his 11,000-person organization, reported by The Information, Andreou wrote that the product needed to earn and respect the right to exist in customers' lives.
The numbers explain the urgency. Microsoft said last month that Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats, up from 20 million in April — roughly 7 percent of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats it reported in January. On the consumer side, Sensor Tower estimated 38.5 million monthly users in July, against roughly a billion for ChatGPT.
Microsoft is not alone in simplifying. Anthropic has folded Cowork into Claude's chat interface, OpenAI merged its Operator agent into ChatGPT, and Google has been consolidating specialized capabilities into the Gemini app. Core Copilot chat stays free, Microsoft says, subject to capacity and limits — though it acknowledges some users will hit those limits sooner than they do today.
