Microsoft is merging its consumer and enterprise Copilot products into a single application by August 2026, part of a broader push to simplify a lineup that has grown complicated across multiple apps and tiers.

As part of the change, Microsoft is retiring underperforming features, including Copilot Podcasts and Copilot Labs. In their place, the company is rolling out a paid AutoPilot tier that gives users access to background AI agents capable of handling automation and task management without constant prompting.

Two new frontier models have also arrived inside Copilot: OpenAI‘s GPT-5.6 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5, giving users a choice of underlying model rather than a single Microsoft-controlled option.

Other updates are arriving on a rolling basis. Notebooks inside the Copilot app, which sync with OneNote, are rolling out from early to mid-August. Copilot can now display rich images pulled from files and meetings directly inside its responses, and it can generate an interactive SharePoint dashboard from a list that stays connected to the underlying data rather than existing as a static export.

Enterprise customers split between Microsoft 365 Copilot and the consumer-facing Copilot app have had to manage separate admin consoles, licensing terms and data-handling policies, a source of friction the merger is meant to resolve.

The push toward a unified app comes as Microsoft faces a conversion problem: fewer than 4.5% of Microsoft 365’s roughly 450 million commercial seats have upgraded to a paid Copilot subscription, according to figures cited alongside the announcement.

Microsoft has not said whether the unified app will change pricing for existing Copilot subscribers, or how the transition will affect enterprise customers currently running separate consumer and business deployments.

Copilot’s growth strategy has increasingly leaned on bundling rather than standalone subscriptions, following Microsoft’s broader pattern of folding new AI features directly into Windows and Microsoft 365 rather than selling them as separate products.

The move puts Microsoft in more direct competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, both of which have spent the past year consolidating their own free and paid tiers into simpler single-app experiences.