Too many Copilots in the cockpit: Internal Microsoft audio shows it’s trying to address confusion about its AI apps

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaking at a conference in San Francisco.

Carlos Barria/REUTERS

Microsoft plans to address confusion over its multiple Copilot products, internal audio shows.
The confusion comes from its multiple apps with the same Copilot name.
Microsoft is trying to fix this by making experience coherent across apps, executives said.

Microsoft employees are worried customers can’t keep all of its Copilot products straight, but the company has a plan to address the confusion, according to audio from an internal meeting reviewed by Business Insider.

In a recent all-employee town hall, a Microsoft employee asked how the company plans to make the fact that it has multiple Copilot apps less confusing to users.

Microsoft has two different Copilot apps in mobile app stores. One consumer version built by Microsoft AI and another that’s a rebranded Microsoft Office app called Copilot. They both open to a similar-looking chat experience, the employee said, and the average user likely wouldn’t be able to tell that one has Word, Excel, and PowerPoint built into it.

“The one way to make it less confusing is to have a billion users of each,” Nadella said, drawing laughter from the crowd of employees. “Quite honestly, the best answer to a lot of the confusion is just daily usage, right?”

The context of the products should clear up confusion, Nadella said.

“If you think about it, we have one other Copilot, which is GitHub Copilot,” Nadella said. “No one is confused about the context of GitHub Copilot.”

Customers have learned to do profile switching between personal Microsoft accounts, or MSA, and a separate work or school account, internally called an Entra ID, he said.

“That said, I think you’re right,” Nadella said. “We do need to ensure that our marketing approach and our branding approach conveys this.”

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, said 100 million monthly active users already use the combination of the two Copilots. The most important thing is for the two tools to work the same, so customers have a coherent and simple experience switching between the apps, he explained.

Microsoft is also being more deliberate about how each Copilot gets promoted, Mehdi said. Mehdi is working with Mustafa Suleyman, who leads the consumer Copilot, and Rajesh Jha, who oversees the Microsoft 365 version, to decide which version Microsoft spotlights in different contexts. PCs for corporate uses, for example, will ship with Microsoft 365 Copilot preinstalled.

An advertising watchdog recently called out Microsoft’s “universal use of the product description as ‘Copilot'” and said “consumers would not necessarily understand the difference.”

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment.

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Read the original article on Business Insider

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