Microsoft will go all-in on ‘Copilot’ for AI, letting Bing fade into the background again

Ben Schoon | Nov 15 2023 - 1:40 pm PT

Microsoft used AI to bring Bing back to the spotlight earlier this year with the debut of “Bing Chat,” but that branding is now fading to the background again as Microsoft has announced that it will go all-in on the “Copilot” brand for its AI products.

Alongside several other big announcements today, including Microsoft’s first custom chips for AI, the company has also announced several other updates to its AI strategy. Among these is the wider use of the “Copilot” brand.

Microsoft first introduced Copilot as a part of Windows 11, bringing the GPT-powered AI chatbot to computers. While that’s still in preview, it seems Microsoft wants to dive much further into it. Soon, “Bing Chat” will be rebranded as “Copilot.”

Microsoft explains:

Our efforts to simplify the user experience and make Copilot more accessible to everyone starts with Bing, our leading experience for the web. Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply become Copilot. With these changes, when signed in with a Microsoft Entra ID, customers using Copilot in Bing, Edge and Windows will receive the benefit of commercial data protection. Over time, Microsoft will also expand the eligibility of Copilot with commercial data protection to even more Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) users at no additional cost. Copilot (formerly Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise) will be out of preview and become generally available starting Dec. 1.

It’s a pretty radical shift, as Microsoft’s AI push led to some early but major gains for Bing as a search engine. On the new copilot.microsoft.com web app, Copilot is branded as “Your everyday AI companion” with the line “with Bing” appended on in much smaller text.

AI won’t be removed from Bing.com, but it’s pretty clear where Microsoft is headed with this.