Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, embedded across Windows, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Edge, and a growing set of enterprise surfaces. It's Microsoft's consumer-facing answer to ChatGPT and the single largest distribution channel for OpenAI's frontier models — Copilot is the AI experience that most Microsoft 365 and Windows users actually touch.
This page is the living reference to Microsoft Copilot — the product family, pricing, what's new, how it compares, and every story we publish tagged Copilot. We update it whenever Microsoft ships a meaningful change.
As of April 2026, Copilot runs on GPT-5 with MAI-1 handling lower-cost workloads, and the product has consolidated into four surfaces: consumer Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Copilot Studio for custom agents.
We rated Microsoft Copilot 4.0 / 5. The strongest case for Copilot is not the model — it is the permission-aware access to your own mail, files and meetings, and contractual commitments most rivals do not match. The weakest is the bill: the paid work licence is an add-on that requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription underneath it, so the sticker price is never the real price.
Read the full Microsoft Copilot review →Latest news about Microsoft Copilot
Every story we've published tagged Copilot. Refreshed automatically every time the newsroom publishes.
- Aug 13, 2026Microsoft retires Mico, the Copilot avatar it launched 10 months agoThe emotive yellow blob is being pulled from Copilot's voice mode and shunted to Learn Live, joining Clippy and Cortana on the shelf.
- Aug 13, 2026Microsoft folds consumer and business Copilot into one app, kills Mico and Deep ResearchThe August 18 consolidation ditches Group Chats, AI podcasts, Copilot Labs, and the floating blob mascot Mico.
- Aug 13, 2026Microsoft merges consumer and commercial Copilot apps ahead of super app launchOne app, one icon, one taskbar entry — Microsoft is laying groundwork for a unified Copilot super app due later this year.
- Jul 30, 2026Microsoft pitches its own AI models against OpenAI and AnthropicSatya Nadella tells enterprises to stop trusting single frontier labs, pushing MAI models and Maya chips as cheaper swaps.
- Jul 30, 2026Microsoft confirms Copilot 'super app' merging chat, code and agents this quarterSatya Nadella says the unified Copilot will span consumer and commercial use, arriving as Microsoft posts $90B in quarterly revenue.
- Jul 16, 2026Microsoft coaches sales team to pitch against OpenAI and AnthropicExecutives at an internal FY27 strategy meeting told salespeople to frame Copilot as faster and more secure than Claude and rival models.
Timeline of major releases
- Feb 7, 2023Bing Chat launchesMicrosoft releases "the new Bing" with an AI chat mode powered by a pre-release version of GPT-4. Later rebranded to Copilot.
- Nov 1, 2023Copilot for Microsoft 365 launchesMicrosoft 365 Copilot ships to enterprise customers at $30/user/month, integrating AI into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
- Jan 15, 2024Copilot Pro launchesMicrosoft introduces Copilot Pro at $20/month for consumers, bundling GPT-4 access with Microsoft 365 app integration.
- Oct 1, 2024Copilot redesign and agentsMicrosoft overhauls Copilot with a new consumer design and introduces "Copilot Agents" for building task-specific AI workflows.
- Oct 20, 2025Copilot moves to GPT-5Microsoft migrates Copilot to GPT-5 across consumer and enterprise surfaces, plus adds its own MAI-1 model for cheaper tasks.
- Mar 15, 2026Copilot Studio and Agent StoreMicrosoft launches an Agent Store inside Copilot Studio, letting customers install and publish reusable Copilot agents across their organizations.
How to access Microsoft Copilot
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot Free | $0 | Basic Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and in Windows, Edge, and the mobile apps. |
| Copilot Pro | $20/mo | GPT-5 priority access in the consumer Copilot, integration into Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook for personal Microsoft 365 users. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | $30/user/mo | Copilot across Microsoft 365 apps for business, including enterprise grounding on SharePoint/OneDrive, admin controls, compliance. |
| GitHub Copilot | $10/mo (individual) | AI pair programmer in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Neovim. GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet available as model options. |
| GitHub Copilot Business | $19/user/mo | GitHub Copilot with enterprise controls, org-level policies, and IP indemnification. |
| Copilot Studio | Usage-based | Build, publish, and manage custom Copilot agents. Priced per message consumed. |
Microsoft Copilot vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini
| Feature | Microsoft Copilot | ChatGPT | Gemini |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office suite integration | Microsoft 365 (native) | No | Google Workspace (native) |
| Enterprise price | $30/user/mo | $25–60/user/mo (Team/Enterprise) | $20/user/mo (Business add-on) |
| Coding assistant | GitHub Copilot (strong) | Codex (strong) | Gemini Code Assist |
| Model choice | GPT-5, MAI-1, Claude (in GH Copilot) | GPT-5 family only | Gemini family only |
| Agents | Copilot Studio + Agent Store | GPTs | Gems |
| Platform lock-in | Tight to Microsoft 365 / Windows | Neutral | Tight to Google Workspace |
The Copilot family
Microsoft's Copilot brand covers several distinct products that share the name and some plumbing: the consumer Copilot (free and Pro), Microsoft 365 Copilot (enterprise Office integration), GitHub Copilot (developer pair programmer), and Copilot Studio (agent builder). Each is a separate product with its own pricing and target audience, but they increasingly share data and context through Microsoft Graph.
The underlying intelligence is a blend: GPT-5 via the OpenAI partnership for most frontier tasks, Microsoft's own MAI-1 for latency-sensitive or cost-sensitive workloads, and — inside GitHub Copilot — optional routing to Claude Sonnet and Gemini for specific tasks. This multi-model approach is a real differentiator vs. ChatGPT (OpenAI only) and Gemini (Google only).
Microsoft 365 Copilot in 2026
If you work inside Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the product that matters. It adds AI assistance inside Word (drafting, rewriting), Excel (formula help, analysis, chart generation), PowerPoint (slide creation from outlines), Outlook (thread summaries, reply drafting), and Teams (meeting summaries, action items).
The enterprise value comes from grounding — Copilot can see your SharePoint, OneDrive, email, and calendar (subject to existing permissions) and answer questions that combine company context with AI reasoning. Compared to a generic chatbot, that grounding is the thing Microsoft is uniquely positioned to ship.
Copilot Studio and the agent story
Copilot Studio is Microsoft's agent-builder platform — think "GPTs, but for Microsoft 365 data." You build an agent with a prompt plus some Microsoft Graph grounding, and you can publish it inside your organization or — new in March 2026 — to an Agent Store that other Microsoft customers can install.
This is where the Microsoft bet plays out long-term. OpenAI's GPTs are consumer-first; Copilot Studio is enterprise-first, which matches Microsoft's core distribution. It's still early, but Copilot Studio is one of the credible agent platforms to watch alongside OpenAI's agent tooling and Anthropic's Claude Code.
Where Copilot wins — and where it doesn't
Copilot wins if your work lives in Microsoft 365 or Windows. The integration depth inside Excel, Outlook, and Teams is unmatched and improves quarterly. GitHub Copilot remains the most widely deployed coding assistant, with a meaningful lead in IDE distribution.
It loses to ChatGPT on raw chat polish and the consumer ecosystem (GPTs, projects, custom tooling). It loses to Gemini on long-context research inside Workspace. And Copilot-branded consumer surfaces have struggled to carve out an identity distinct from ChatGPT — many users default to chatgpt.com because it's faster to iterate on conversations there.
GitHub Copilot vs Microsoft Copilot — clearing up the confusion
The two share a name and a parent company but are different products with different audiences, billing, and feature roadmaps. GitHub Copilot is the developer pair-programmer launched in 2021, billed through GitHub at $10/$19/$39 per user per month for Individual, Business, and Enterprise. It lives inside VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, Neovim, and Xcode, and as of 2026 supports model routing across GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 2.5 Pro depending on the task.
Microsoft Copilot is the umbrella consumer/enterprise assistant brand — what used to be Bing Chat, then Windows Copilot, now consolidated. It's billed through Microsoft 365 ($20/user/month consumer Pro, $30/user/month for the M365 Copilot enterprise add-on) and lives inside Edge, Windows 11, Office apps, Teams, and the standalone copilot.microsoft.com site.
Practical rule: if you're a developer, you want GitHub Copilot. If you're an Office or Windows user, you want Microsoft Copilot. Many teams subscribe to both because the product overlap is small. The shared piece — Copilot Studio — sits in a third category as the agent builder for Microsoft Graph data, billed separately again.
Privacy, data residency, and enterprise compliance
Microsoft's enterprise pitch on Copilot leans heavily on the data boundary. The "Commercial Data Protection" promise — formerly Bing Chat Enterprise — covers Microsoft 365 Copilot end-to-end: prompts and responses are not retained, not used to train foundation models, and not surfaced outside the user's tenant. The same protections extend to Copilot in Edge when signed in with a work or school account.
Data residency is where Microsoft has the broadest geographic coverage of any frontier-model vendor. Microsoft 365 Copilot honors Microsoft 365 data-residency commitments, which include EU Data Boundary processing, country-specific storage in Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Australia, India, Japan, Korea, Brazil, and South Africa, and US-government-cloud variants for federal customers. No other AI assistant ships with this many in-region options.
Compliance certifications matter for procurement. Microsoft 365 Copilot inherits the Microsoft 365 stack of attestations — SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001/27017/27018, HIPAA, FedRAMP High, and a long list of country-specific regimes. Customers who already approved Microsoft 365 typically clear Copilot through a delta review rather than a full new procurement. That speed-to-yes is the under-appreciated advantage Microsoft holds over OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in regulated enterprises.
Our coverage
Everything tagged Copilot appears in Latest news above. For Microsoft's broader AI strategy, the OpenAI partnership, and GitHub direction, see our reporting under the AI news and AI business beats. For alternatives, see ChatGPT and Gemini.
