Microsoft is working on a project intended to solve one of the biggest problems with its artificial intelligence: customers are getting lost among the various versions of Copilot and do not know where to find what they need. The solution is set to be a forthcoming super app that will bring everything together in one place. It will include GitHub Copilot for programmers, Copilot Chat, the Copilot Cowork tool, and an entirely new feature with the working title Autopilot. According to two sources familiar with the project who requested anonymity, the internal project bears the motto "Delivering one Copilot." The launch is planned for the end of the summer.
Microsoft entered the artificial intelligence field very early. Its $13 billion partnership with OpenAI was supposed to catapult it to the forefront of development. Instead, Copilot expanded into so many forms that customers stopped knowing what they were actually buying. There is Copilot for consumers, Copilot for businesses, Copilot in Microsoft 365, and GitHub Copilot for developers. Each has a different name, a different pricing model, and is accessible in a different place. Meanwhile, the internal teams responsible for the consumer and enterprise versions of Copilot operated separately, without a shared vision.
The result is that fewer than 4.5% of Microsoft 365's 450 million customers pay for Copilot. That is a humiliating figure for the company's leadership.
What Does Autopilot Actually Do?
In March of this year, Satya Nadella reorganized the company's leadership and appointed Jacob Andreou to head the unified Copilot team. Before joining Microsoft, Andreou led product and growth in artificial intelligence and previously held a similar position at the social network Snap. He now has one main task: to bring the consumer and enterprise versions of Copilot under one roof.
Autopilot remains the project's biggest mystery. It is an agentic layer, meaning a feature that should be capable of performing tasks independently without a person guiding it step by step. Microsoft has not yet revealed exactly how it works from a technical standpoint, what its scope is, or what safety restrictions it has. The term "agentic" is being used increasingly often in the technology industry, but the specific form Autopilot will take remains behind closed doors.
The app is also expected to include a switch that will allow users to easily move between their personal and business Microsoft 365 Copilot accounts. The individual Copilot products will remain accessible outside the super app as well.
GitHub Copilot Is Lagging Far Behind the Competition
GitHub Copilot, whose Pro version starts at $10 per month and which has more than 4.7 million paying users, is facing growing pressure from startups. Cursor has built a strong developer base, while Anthropic has launched Claude Code, which is breaking records. The consumer Copilot Chat is not faring much better. In terms of active users, it significantly trails both ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Although Microsoft adopted OpenAI's models as its foundation, they have repeatedly lagged behind the competition in benchmarks, dragging down the entire Copilot brand.
The Microsoft Build conference, which is being held in San Francisco, could offer the first glimpses of the new app. A full presentation of the super app is not currently planned, but Microsoft's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman will speak at the event and is expected to unveil new proprietary AI models. Suleyman, who previously led the consumer Copilot team, has focused exclusively on model development since the March reorganization.
Whether Microsoft manages to launch the unified app by the end of the summer will depend on how smoothly it can merge teams with different priorities, different customers, and different business models. Andreou has only been in the role for a few months, and summer is just around the corner.
Sources: fortune.com and aiweekly.co
