Microsoft unveils Copilot super app, targeting business users with AI agents

After the AI boom took off about four years ago, Microsoft poured resources into winning both the consumer and enterprise sides of AI. With the unveiling of its Copilot AI “super app” Friday, the software giant has returned to basics, aiming its most capable technology at business customers.

Microsoft is launching its super app as a central interface through which customers can chat with AI bots, tap AI tools to help accomplish tasks, write code, and access a new “Autopilot” feature that brings agentic capabilities — AI that can act on tasks on its own — to the company’s flagship AI app. The super app is a major redesign of Microsoft’s existing Copilot app, bringing together a variety of features and capabilities intended to create a Swiss Army knife for AI productivity. The launch follows a push by Microsoft to merge what had become a sprawling collection of Copilot products that critics said left customers confused.

For Chief Executive Satya Nadella, the new Copilot is a way to win subscriptions in a business that’s become increasingly important to the software maker, while also ensuring that Microsoft’s lucrative productivity offerings don’t get sidelined by a new generation of AI rivals. 

The super app, first reported by Fortune in May, also plugs into Microsoft’s Office tools, letting users ask a bot to handle a task on an Excel spreadsheet or change a layout in a Word document. Though there is a free version of the super app, customers will need their Microsoft subscriptions or workplace licenses to unlock its full range of offerings. Both enterprise customers and individual users will have to pay extra based on usage of its most autonomous capabilities.

“We do want this to become an all-in-one productivity........

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