Microsoft to Merge Consumer and Business Copilot Apps Into One Platform

Microsoft admits its AI assistant needs to win users back. In an internal memo, Jacob Andreou, the vice president in charge of Copilot, wrote bluntly that the app must "earn the right to exist." The result is set to be a merger of the consumer and business versions of Copilot into a single platform by August 2026, along with the removal of features that never caught on with users.

Andreou oversees a team of more than 11,000 people working on Copilot. His memo, which leaked to the press, frames the plan as a response to hard data: despite years of investment and integration across the Microsoft 365 suite, the vast majority of business subscribers have never paid for the full version of the assistant.

What's Cut, What Remains

The list of scrapped features includes Copilot Podcasts, quietly launched in late 2024 and never generating real interest, whiteboard transcription in Microsoft Teams Rooms, some creative-writing templates in Copilot Lab, and a short-lived integration with Microsoft To Do. In their place, Microsoft is betting on AutoPilot, an agentic component available for an extra fee and billed based on model usage, tool calls, and background processing time.

The unified app is meant to bring GitHub Copilot, Copilot chat, Copilot Cowork, and the new AutoPilot agent layer under one roof, built on a shared user identity graph. Instead of separate apps for work and personal use, users will switch between contexts within a single window.

Competitive Pressure

Microsoft doesn't hide that the change is a response to rising expectations for AI assistants, shaped by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. OpenAI claims more than 50 million paid ChatGPT users, considerably more than Microsoft's paid Copilot subscriber count despite access to hundreds of millions of business accounts through Microsoft 365.

stripped out what wasn't working - Jacob Andreou, Microsoft vice president in charge of Copilot

The app reorganization coincides with Microsoft's launch of a separate unit called Frontier Company, worth $2.5 billion and staffed by 6,000 specialists who help clients deploy AI systems. It shows the company is simultaneously selling AI deployments to large corporate clients while trying to fix a mass-market consumer and office product that has gotten stuck at a low level of actual use.

Implications for Businesses in Poland

For Polish companies using Microsoft 365, the app merger will mean, in practice, an interface change and a possible licensing reorganization in the coming weeks. A statistic cited by Microsoft, that 78 percent of employees with business access to AI also use the same tool privately, suggests the company is counting on the unified app to boost conversion to paid plans on both sides, among employers and individual users alike.

For IT departments, this also means preparing for a change to the interface employees interact with daily, as well as for a new billing model for AutoPilot agents based on actual compute resource usage rather than a flat license fee.

What Comes Next

By August, Microsoft is expected to finalize the details of AutoPilot's pricing and the final list of features that survive the merger. The key question is whether combining two apps into one will actually convince businesses to pay for Copilot, or whether it will turn out to be just a cosmetic rebranding with the same adoption numbers that are worrying Microsoft's management today.

Sources: PYMNTS (pymnts.com), Winbuzzer (winbuzzer.com)