Microsoft Merges Copilot Into a Single App, Introduces Paid AutoPilot Agents

Microsoft is preparing the biggest overhaul of Copilot since its launch. According to an internal memo obtained by The Information, the company will merge its previously separate consumer and business apps into a single product by August 2026, while cutting features that almost no one uses.

The reform is being led by Jacob Andreou, the vice president responsible for Copilot, who took on the role in March 2026 and oversees more than 11,000 employees. His task is to untangle a sprawling product family that included separate versions for sales, customer service and security, and that, according to Microsoft itself, was confusing customers.

What's Being Cut, What's Coming

Copilot Podcasts, a feature that automatically generates audio summaries of meetings and documents, and Copilot Labs, a channel for experimental test features, will be shut down due to low user engagement. In their place will come an integrated AI coding tool and a new category of agents called AutoPilot.

AutoPilot refers to autonomous agents that run in the background without needing to be manually triggered for every task. They monitor email, calendar and organizational data through Microsoft Graph and take action within set permissions. The first publicly named agent of this kind is Microsoft Scout, which can carry out tasks simultaneously in the cloud, on the desktop and in the browser, according to policies set by the user and the organization.

Why Agents Cost More

AutoPilot agents will be billed separately, since a single background task, such as scheduling a meeting with multiple participants or summarizing an email thread, can require between 10 and 20 separate model calls. Gartner analysts estimated in March 2026 that agentic tasks consume 5 to 30 times more tokens than a simple chatbot query.

Billing for Copilot Cowork, a feature already tested by more than half of the Fortune 500 companies during a three-month trial period, will be based on actual usage: the number of model calls, search operations, tool calls and runtime. IT administrators will be able to set spending limits and usage alerts at the organizational level.

Copilot has to earn the right to exist - Jacob Andreou, Microsoft vice president responsible for Copilot

Competitive Pressure

The Copilot reorganization coincides with the launch of Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion unit employing 6,000 specialists to deploy AI directly at enterprise customers. Both moves show that Microsoft treats the slow pace of paid Copilot adoption as an urgent business problem, not a cosmetic product detail.

For Polish companies using Microsoft 365, this means reviewing which teams actually pay for Copilot and whether the new, merged app with paid AutoPilot agents meets real needs rather than just a licensing bundle imposed from above. IT departments will also need to reconfigure identity controls, data connector permissions and event logging before autonomous agents start operating on company mailboxes and calendars.

Microsoft has not yet disclosed full pricing for the new integrated app or an exact launch date for AutoPilot agents beyond the August 2026 announcement. What is clear is that the company is now betting on a single, unified product instead of a scattered family of Copilots, hoping this will simplify sales and convince more customers to open their wallets.

Sources: Microsoft Plans Copilot App Overhaul to Prove Its Value (winbuzzer.com), Microsoft Merges Consumer and Enterprise Copilot Apps (letsdatascience.com)