Microsoft merges consumer and business Copilot apps, drops Group Chats, AI podcasts, Deep Research, and Mico

Microsoft is abandoning its two-app Copilot strategy and combining the consumer-facing Copilot app with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for business users. The company acknowledges that personal and professional AI usage patterns overlap significantly and that maintaining separate apps created unnecessary complexity. This mirrors a broader industry consolidation: Claude merged Cowork into Chat, OpenAI merged Operator into ChatGPT, and Google consolidated specialized capabilities into its Gemini app.

Several consumer-facing features will be removed by August 18, 2026: Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts, Copilot Labs experimental features, Deep Research, and the Mico animated character. Paying professional users will retain access to Researcher as a replacement for Deep Research. Some features may temporarily disappear during the transition, and files generated by the standalone Copilot app will be migrated to OneDrive.

The cuts are an implicit admission that Copilot's feature sprawl diluted its value. Microsoft EVP Jacob Andreou wrote in an internal memo that Copilot needed to earn "the right to exist" in customers' lives, requiring the company to move on from features that didn't work. For teams building integrations or workflows around any of the deprecated capabilities, this creates a concrete migration deadline and a signal that experimental features in Copilot Labs carry elevated deprecation risk.

The unification also changes how organizations should evaluate Copilot adoption. Rather than separate consumer and enterprise tracks with different feature sets, Microsoft is converging on a single experience. Teams currently deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot should note that the feature set is actively being pruned rather than expanded, and that capabilities like Group Chats and AI-generated podcasts, once promoted as differentiators, are being treated as failed experiments.