REDMOND, September 22 — Microsoft has spent the past three years folding artificial intelligence into nearly every corner of its software, and the company’s name for that sprawling effort is Copilot. It is not one product. It is a family of AI-powered tools embedded across Windows, the Edge browser, Bing, Microsoft 365, Teams, GitHub and the company’s security products.
The assistant also exists as a standalone app for iOS, Android and Mac, and it runs in a web browser. Under the hood, Copilot draws on large language models to write text, search the web, summarize emails, generate code, automate tasks and produce or edit images.
Microsoft says it pulls from models built by Microsoft, OpenAI and other developers rather than leaning on a single model for every job. Here’s what it means in plain terms. Think of Copilot less like one app and more like a helper that follows you from window to window.
From Bing Chat to a household name
Copilot arrived in 2023 as a successor to Bing Chat, which itself evolved from Cortana — though it ran on entirely different technology underneath. The timing was no accident. After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, tech companies poured billions of dollars into generative AI, and Microsoft struck a multiyear, multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI.
Copilot was one result of that alliance. The road has not been perfectly smooth.
Microsoft has had false starts with AI, including its Recall feature, which was pulled from the Copilot Plus PC launch before eventually reaching those machines in April 2025. Since then, the company has been merging its personal and work experiences. Its updated Copilot app arrived in August 2026.
The app once called Microsoft 365 Copilot is now simply Microsoft Copilot, with the features you get depending on your account and subscription. The branding has spread to hardware too, through the Copilot Plus PC, an AI laptop Microsoft rolled out.
Where you’ll actually run into it
Many newer Windows laptops carry a dedicated Copilot key that opens the assistant with a single press. You don’t need a Copilot Plus PC to use the chatbot, though. On Windows, Copilot runs as a standalone app, and users can control its file-search permissions and summon it with the optional “Hey Copilot” wake word — or, if their keyboard has one, the Copilot key.
Edge has its own version, offering contextual help while you browse, such as summarizing an article or comparing products. You can chat with Copilot for free, but you’ll need to sign in if you want it to save your chat history or keep a longer conversation going.
Some versions let users pick which AI model to use, though the options vary by plan. The free assistant and the Copilot features bundled into a Microsoft 365 subscription are not interchangeable, and a work account may come with restrictions set by an employer. When Copilot searches the web, it can include links to the sources behind an answer.
That matters, because all AI tools hallucinate, and even confidently delivered answers can be wrong.
How it stacks up against the competition
Copilot sits in a crowded field alongside ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Anthropic’s Claude — all chat interfaces where you type a prompt and get a response, though their abilities now reach well beyond conversation. Meta AI is likewise woven through its social platforms, though it leans toward casual and creative use. The practical upshot shows up in small moments.
If you spend much of your day in Word and Outlook, asking for help inside those apps saves the copy-and-paste shuffle. Instead of asking ChatGPT to draft an email and then pasting it into Outlook, Copilot lives inside Outlook and writes the draft using your email history and context.
What to watch next is how Microsoft keeps stitching those personal and work experiences together — and whether the features behind them stay consistent as accounts and subscriptions change.
