Microsoft Copilot
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Microsoft Copilot is the umbrella brand that Microsoft uses for its generative AI assistants and agents across consumer, developer, and enterprise products. The name first appeared on github copilot, a code completion product launched in technical preview on 29 June 2021 and built on OpenAI Codex.[1] Microsoft later extended the Copilot name to a search and chat experience that began as Bing Chat in February 2023, to a productivity assistant called Microsoft 365 Copilot announced in March 2023, and to a growing family of vertical, developer, and hardware products that share the same branding and rely chiefly on models from openai together with Microsoft's own MAI series.[2][3][4] As of May 2026, Microsoft reports more than 20 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats and is rolling Copilot into Windows, the Edge browser, Office applications, the Dynamics business suite, security operations, and a new category of consumer hardware called Copilot+ PCs.[5][6]
The Copilot brand began at GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary since 2018. On 29 June 2021 GitHub introduced GitHub Copilot as a technical preview for openai codex, an "AI pair programmer" that suggested whole lines and functions inside Visual Studio Code.[1] The product was developed jointly with openai and trained on public source code together with natural language. GitHub made Copilot generally available on 21 June 2022, initially at $10 per user per month or $100 per year for individuals.[7] The product became the namesake for the broader Copilot family.
On 7 February 2023 Microsoft introduced what it called "the new Bing," a reinvention of the microsoft search engine that embedded an OpenAI-based chat assistant directly in the search results page and in the Edge browser.[8] The chat feature, branded Bing Chat, used a Microsoft model that the company called Prometheus, which was built on top of gpt 4 with retrieval, ranking, and safety layers added by Bing.[8] Bing Chat opened in a limited waitlist, was opened to anyone with a Microsoft account in May 2023, and crossed one billion chats before the rebrand.[2]
Within weeks of Bing Chat's launch, Microsoft applied the Copilot brand across its product portfolio. On 6 March 2023 the company announced Dynamics 365 Copilot for CRM and ERP workloads.[9] On 16 March 2023 it announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, an assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the Microsoft Graph that combined large language models with each tenant's own data.[3] On 28 March 2023 it announced Security Copilot for security operations centers, the first vertical Copilot to combine gpt 4 with a security-specific model and Microsoft threat intelligence data.[10]
On 21 September 2023 Microsoft made the formal pivot from many product names to a single brand. At a New York City event the company announced Copilot in Windows, a sidebar assistant that began rolling out on 26 September 2023 as part of the Windows 11 23H2 update.[4] The same announcement set 1 November 2023 as the general availability date for Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise customers with 300 or more seats, at $30 per user per month on top of an existing Microsoft 365 license.[11] At the Ignite conference in mid-November 2023 Microsoft completed the rebrand. Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise both became Microsoft Copilot, and the company also introduced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code authoring environment built on the foundations of Power Virtual Agents that lets customers build their own copilots and plug-ins.[12]
On 15 January 2024 Microsoft made Copilot for Microsoft 365 available to businesses of any size, removed the 300 seat minimum, and launched Copilot Pro, a $20 per user per month subscription aimed at individuals who already pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family.[13] Copilot Pro added priority access to the latest OpenAI model during peak hours, image generation through Designer, and Copilot inside the Microsoft 365 desktop applications.[13]
GitHub announced GitHub Copilot Workspace in technical preview on 29 April 2024, framing it as a "Copilot-native developer environment" where developers move from issue to specification to plan to code inside a single workflow driven by Copilot agents.[14] On 20 May 2024, at an event on the eve of the Build developer conference, Microsoft announced Copilot+ PC, a new hardware category that requires a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second.[15] The first Copilot+ PCs shipped on 18 June 2024, with launch silicon from Qualcomm's snapdragon x Elite and Snapdragon X Plus platforms, partner devices from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Microsoft's own Surface line, and a starting price of $999.[15]
On 16 September 2024 Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2, with three centerpiece additions: Copilot Pages, a dynamic shared canvas for human and AI collaboration; Python in Excel through Copilot; and Copilot agents authored in Copilot Studio.[16] On 1 October 2024 the company shipped a redesigned consumer Copilot with Copilot Voice, four real-time conversational voices that use GPT-4o's audio capabilities, and previewed Copilot Vision, a browser-based feature that lets Copilot see and discuss the contents of web pages with the user.[17] Copilot Vision moved into public preview in the Edge browser on 5 December 2024.[18]
In late August 2025 Microsoft AI, the consumer AI division led by Mustafa Suleyman, announced MAI-1-preview, the first text foundation model trained end to end inside Microsoft.[19] The company also unveiled MAI-Voice-1, a real-time speech model, and began testing MAI-1-preview as a backing model for Copilot alongside continued use of gpt 4o and later OpenAI releases.[19] In April 2026 Microsoft AI released three additional in-house foundation models, framed by Suleyman as the foundation of a multi-model Copilot.[20]
On 27 February 2025 Microsoft shipped a native Copilot application for macOS through the Mac App Store, requiring macOS 14 and an Apple Silicon Mac.[21] On 19 November 2024 the company added Copilot Actions and a library of pre-built agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot.[22] On 29 April 2026 Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told investors that paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats had passed 20 million, a 250 percent year-over-year increase, with weekly engagement comparable to Outlook.[6]
The Copilot umbrella covers products across at least four domains. The descriptions below cover the most prominent members of the family as of May 2026.
Consumer Copilot is the descendant of Bing Chat. It runs at copilot.microsoft.com, in the Edge browser, in dedicated apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, and as Copilot in Windows. The free tier offers chat, image generation through Designer, and access to popular OpenAI models with limits during peak hours. Copilot Pro at $20 per user per month removes those limits, adds priority access to newer models, and unlocks Copilot inside the desktop Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote applications for users who already hold a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription.[13]
Microsoft 365 Copilot is the enterprise productivity assistant. It is sold at $30 per user per month as an add-on to a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license.[11] It integrates into Word for drafting, Excel for analysis (including Python in Excel), PowerPoint for slide generation, Outlook for email triage, and Teams for meeting recap and chat, and it grounds answers in the Microsoft Graph, the indexed view of an organization's mail, files, calendar, and chat data.[3][16] A separate, free Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat experience opens the chat interface and pay-as-you-go agents to any commercial Microsoft 365 user without requiring the per-seat license.[23]
Microsoft Copilot Studio is the low-code platform for building agents and custom copilots. It was announced at Ignite 2023 as the successor to Power Virtual Agents, combines a graphical authoring canvas with generative orchestration, and supports both standalone agents and plug-ins that extend Microsoft 365 Copilot.[12] By 2025 Copilot Studio supported multi-agent orchestration, integration with Microsoft Fabric data agents, and a model picker that includes GPT-5 Chat alongside other foundation models.[24]
Microsoft sells Copilot variants tailored to specific job roles and business functions. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales connects to Dynamics 365 Sales or Salesforce. Copilot for Service does the same for customer service workloads. Copilot for Finance assists with Excel-based finance work and ERP data. Dynamics 365 Copilot embeds generative features across the wider business application suite.[25] Security Copilot, generally available since 1 April 2024, is sold separately to security operations teams and exposes Microsoft's security graph through a chat interface.[26]
github copilot remains a distinct product line owned by GitHub. It includes the core code completion product, GitHub Copilot Chat (released in 2023), GitHub Copilot Workspace (technical preview in April 2024), GitHub Copilot for Azure, and GitHub Copilot in the JetBrains, Eclipse, Xcode, Neovim, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code editors.[14] Pricing starts at $10 per user per month for individuals and rises through Business and Enterprise tiers. GitHub Copilot uses several model backends, with selectable models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in addition to GitHub's own fine-tuned variants.[27]
Copilot+ PC is a hardware brand rather than a Copilot product, but it sits inside the same brand family. To carry the Copilot+ badge a PC must include an NPU of at least 40 TOPS, 16 GB of unified memory, and 256 GB of storage. The first wave used Qualcomm snapdragon x Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chips. Later Copilot+ PCs added Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI 300 series silicon. The badge entitles a machine to features that run on-device against the NPU, including Recall (a local screen history index), Cocreator (image generation in Paint and Photos), Live Captions with translation, and Windows Studio Effects.[15]
Microsoft Copilot is not a single model. It is an orchestration layer that picks among multiple foundation models, attaches retrieval and tools, applies safety and grounding filters, and returns responses in the calling application. The chief model sources have been:
Across the family the architecture is similar: a user prompt is enriched with retrieved context (the Microsoft Graph for Microsoft 365 Copilot, the indexed web for consumer Copilot, the GitHub repository for GitHub Copilot, security telemetry for Security Copilot), passed to a chosen foundation model, and post-processed by Microsoft's responsible-AI filters before being returned. Plug-ins, agents, and tools built with Copilot Studio extend that loop with additional retrieval or with the ability to take action against line-of-business systems.[12]
The Copilot family covers a wide range of price points and licensing structures. Public list prices as of May 2026 include:
Microsoft Copilot is the AI brand with the largest paid enterprise install base. By April 2026 Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella reported more than 20 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, a 250 percent year-over-year increase in seat adds, weekly user engagement comparable to Outlook, and named customer deployments at Accenture (more than 740,000 seats), Bayer, Johnson and Johnson, Mercedes-Benz, and Roche.[6] At its Ignite 2024 conference Microsoft reported that nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 500 had adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot.[28] GitHub Copilot, the oldest product in the family, surpassed 400,000 paying subscribers within a month of general availability in 2022 and has continued to grow strongly through 2026.[29]
Reception has been mixed on the consumer side. The original Bing Chat launch attracted attention for its long, emotionally erratic conversations during the first two weeks of February 2023, a problem Microsoft addressed by introducing a turn limit and revising the system prompt.[30] The November 2023 rebrand to Copilot was generally welcomed for simplifying a confusing product portfolio, though critics noted that the umbrella term made it harder to know which specific product was being discussed in any given context.[31] The May 2024 announcement of Recall, the on-device screen history feature for Copilot+ PCs, produced a sustained privacy and security backlash that led Microsoft to delay the feature, redesign it as opt-in, and require Windows Hello authentication and an encrypted local store before relaunching it for Windows Insiders in November 2024.[32]
Microsoft Copilot competes with several other major AI assistant brands. The table summarizes the most visible competitors as of May 2026.
| Product | Vendor | Primary model source | Free consumer tier | Paid consumer tier | Enterprise tier | Native integration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Copilot | Microsoft | OpenAI GPT family plus Microsoft MAI and Prometheus[2][19] | Yes[4] | $20 / mo (Copilot Pro)[13] | $30 / user / mo (Microsoft 365 Copilot)[11] | Windows, Office, Edge, Teams, Dynamics |
| chatgpt | OpenAI | OpenAI GPT family[33] | Yes | $20 / mo (Plus), $200 / mo (Pro) | ChatGPT Business / Enterprise (custom)[33] | OpenAI apps, browser, third-party connectors |
| claude | Anthropic | Claude family | Yes | $20 / mo (Pro), $200 / mo (Max) | Claude Enterprise (custom)[34] | Claude apps, Claude Code, partner integrations |
| gemini | Google Gemini family | Yes | $20 / mo (AI Pro), $250 / mo (AI Ultra) | Google Workspace with Gemini (per seat)[35] | Chrome, Android, Google Workspace | |
| apple intelligence | Apple | Apple Foundation Models with optional ChatGPT extension | Free with eligible Apple devices | None | None | iOS, iPadOS, macOS[36] |
Among the four assistant brands sold to individuals, Copilot and ChatGPT both cost $20 per month at the entry paid tier and both expose OpenAI models. The key differences are distribution and grounding: Copilot is wired into Windows and Microsoft 365 and grounds answers in tenant data via the Microsoft Graph, while ChatGPT is a standalone product with its own connector ecosystem. gemini shares the same shape inside Google Workspace, and Apple Intelligence operates only inside Apple operating systems and uses on-device models for most tasks. Industry comparisons in 2026 typically argue that Copilot is the strongest choice for organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365, ChatGPT for the largest community and most mature API, Claude for high-context and high-accuracy work, and Gemini for organizations on Google Workspace.[31]
Microsoft has framed enterprise data protection as a core differentiator for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company's published commitments state that prompts and responses from Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat are processed inside the Microsoft 365 service boundary, are protected by the same contractual terms as customer email and SharePoint content, are not used to train the underlying foundation models, and inherit the tenant's existing identity, access, and compliance configuration.[37][38] Microsoft 365 Copilot honors permissions set in Microsoft Entra and SharePoint, applies Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, supports eDiscovery and audit logging, and is certified against GDPR, ISO/IEC 27018, and the EU Data Boundary.[37]
Privacy outcomes have been more contested on the consumer side. The Recall feature for Copilot+ PCs drew sustained criticism from security researchers and privacy advocates after its May 2024 announcement, with researcher Kevin Beaumont demonstrating that early builds stored screen contents in an unencrypted SQLite database and Signal president Meredith Whittaker calling the feature "a dangerous honeypot for hackers."[32] Microsoft delayed Recall, made it opt-in during Windows setup, encrypted the local store, and required Windows Hello authentication for retrieval before re-releasing it to Copilot+ PCs in November 2024.[32] The episode is often cited as the most prominent privacy controversy in the Copilot family.