Microsoft is merging its two Copilot apps and killing off several features nobody used much

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Microsoft has begun consolidating its separate consumer and business Copilot apps into a single unified experience, a process that started rolling out this week and includes retiring several features the company has apparently decided did not earn their keep. Consumers with personal accounts will be migrated to the new app automatically, with existing chats and content carried over in the process, though a handful of specific features are being cut entirely rather than simply merged.

According to Microsoft, users will lose access to Group Chats, AI generated podcasts within Copilot, the experimental Copilot Labs features, and Deep Research by August 18. For paying professional users specifically, a feature called Researcher is being offered as a replacement for at least the Deep Research capability, though consumer users apparently do not get an equivalent substitute. Files generated through the standalone Copilot app are being migrated over to OneDrive as part of the transition, and Microsoft has warned that some features may be temporarily unavailable while the underlying migration work happens in the background.

One particularly visible casualty of this consolidation is Mico, the floating blob character Microsoft introduced as an animated personality for Copilot, which is reportedly being dropped as part of the broader simplification effort. That specific detail matters more than it might seem at first glance, because it signals a shift away from trying to give Copilot a distinct playful personality and toward treating it as more of a straightforward utility layered directly into existing Microsoft 365 workflows.

Internally, the framing around this move has apparently been fairly blunt. According to reporting that cited an internal memo, Microsoft executive Jacob Andreou, who oversees Copilot, reportedly told staff the app needed to earn the right to exist in customers' daily lives, which meant moving on from features that simply were not working as intended. That is an unusually candid admission from a major tech company about a consumer product underperforming expectations, rather than the usual corporate framing where every change gets described purely as an improvement or an evolution.

This consolidation also fits into a much broader industry pattern happening across nearly every major AI assistant right now. Claude recently folded its Cowork feature into the main Chat interface, OpenAI merged its agentic Operator feature directly into ChatGPT, and Google has been steadily adding capabilities like combined deep research and web browsing into a single unified Gemini app rather than maintaining separate standalone tools. The era of AI companies shipping a dozen scattered experimental features across multiple different apps appears to be giving way to a much stronger industry wide push toward consolidation and simplicity

Microsoft kills off unsuccessful AI features while merging its separate Copilot apps | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com