Microsoft announced it is transforming Copilot, its AI assistant, into a standalone Windows application, and moving its icon back to the PC’s desktop foreground.
Until now, the Copilot icon was located in the lower right corner of the screen with a “Pre” label, indicating it was a “preview”. Now, Microsoft is abandoning the “preview” label and upgrading Copilot to a fully-fledged product by positioning its icon in the middle of the taskbar.
Harjit Dhaliwal, Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager for Windows Commercial, explained the changes were made to provide a more flexible interface similar to applications. He wrote in the company’s blog, “To integrate more seamlessly into everyday workflows and provide assistance more conveniently through artificial intelligence, we decided to turn Copilot into a separate application. This will allow Copilot users to have the advantage of conventional applications, such as resizing, snapping, and moving the window. This will allow users to interact more effectively with generative AI in Windows.”
As highlighted by PCWorld, it remains to be seen whether the changes will be available for all users or exclusively for commercial customers. The blog post mentions that Copilot will maintain support for the “Internet” and “Work” tabs for Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers, offering businesses’ commercial data protection in compatible web browsers like Microsoft Edge. This means that chat data will not be saved and will not be used to train AI models.
