Microsoft merges consumer and business Copilot into one app, killing Podcasts, Deep Research, and Group Chat
The August 18 rollout is the structural groundwork for CEO Satya Nadella's promised Copilot 'Super App,' due by the end of September.
Microsoft collapsed its two Copilot apps into one on August 18, retiring Copilot Podcasts, Group Chat, Deep Research, and the expressive blob mascot Mico from the consumer product in the same stroke. It’s the clearest signal yet that CEO Satya Nadella’s promised “Super App,” which he told investors on the July 29 earnings call would ship by quarter’s end, is a consolidation play rather than a feature launch.
The merged Microsoft Copilot app absorbs Microsoft 365 Copilot, with automatic redirects from m365.cloud.microsoft to copilot.cloud.microsoft rolling out in late August. Deep Research survives only for Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers under a renamed feature called Researcher. Free chat continues, “subject to capacity and limits.” Podcasts created or saved inside Copilot will be entirely unavailable after the update, with shared links going dark; Microsoft is telling users to download anything they want to keep.
The numbers explain the ruthlessness. Sensor Tower pegged the consumer Copilot app at 38.5 million monthly users in July. ChatGPT sits near a billion. On the enterprise side, Microsoft 365 Copilot has grown to 30 million paid seats from 20 million in April, with net additions more than doubling quarter over quarter. One product is a rounding error in the consumer AI race. The other is compounding. Guess which one gets to define the merged app’s center of gravity.
Jacob Andreou, the EVP overseeing Copilot, framed the culling in an internal memo reported by The Information in July, telling staff the app needed to earn “the right to exist” in customers’ lives and that features which didn’t work had to go. Mico, which TechCrunch likened to an AI-ified Clippy, was introduced less than a year ago. It didn’t make it.
The Super App will fold in AutoPilot agents and Cowork, the enterprise-flavored features that reflect where Microsoft’s paying customers actually are. Podcasts and a cartoon blob reflected where they weren’t. Nadella has spent a year telling investors Copilot is a platform. What shipped on August 18 is Microsoft admitting it needs to be one app first.
Sources
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/13/microsoft-kills-off-unsuccessful-ai-features-while-merging-its-separate-copilot-apps/
- https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-starts-merging-its-copilot-consumer-and-business-apps-in-advance-of-super-app-rollout/
- https://fortune.com/2026/08/13/microsoft-begins-merge-consumer-and-enterprise-copilot-ai-apps/
- https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/13/microsofts-dueling-copilot-apps-have-combined-into-a-single-entity/5287512
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-copilot/learning/changes-microsoft-copilot-app