Microsoft Adds More Copilots to Help Copilot Copilot
Oh look, another new copilot for Microsoft Copilot. Here's Jordan Novet for CNBC:
Microsoft said Tuesday that it’s bringing together the engineering groups for its commercial and consumer Copilot assistants, which have yet to gain broad adoption.
Jacob Andreou, a former Snap executive who works in Microsoft’s artificial intelligence unit, will become an executive vice president in charge of the consumer and commercial Copilot experience, CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a memo to employees.
Andreou will report to Nadella. Executives Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke and Charles Lamanna, who will also report to Nadella, will lead Microsoft 365 applications and the Copilot platform, Nadella wrote.
While it undoubtedly makes sense to try to unify these disparate Copilot groups, which are a branding, if not organizational nightmare, the fact that all of these people will now report directly to Satya Nadella is sort of wild. Yes, there are now four copilots of Copilot – well, actually, five:
The Copilot moves will free up executive Mustafa Suleyman, a former co-founder of AI lab DeepMind that Google bought in 2014, to focus more on building new models.
“The next phase of this plan is to restructure our organization to enable me to focus all my energy on our Superintelligence efforts and be able to deliver world class models for Microsoft over the next 5 years,” Suleyman wrote in a memo. “These models will enable us to build enterprise tuned lineages that help improve all our products across the company.”
"Free up" seems like just about the most generous way possible to frame this shift. As it's a pretty clear acknowledgement that Suleyman's endless efforts to create AI products for Microsoft to compete with ChatGPT and Gemini have failed. It now even looks like Microsoft is quickly falling behind Claude...
Microsoft’s Copilot app had 6 million daily active users in February, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 440 million and Google’s Gemini had 82 million, according to data from app analytics company Sensor Tower.
Sensor Tower said that so far in March, Anthropic’s Claude, which has gotten extensive media attention because of Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. Department of Defense, has reached 9 million daily users, while Copilot still stands at 6 million.
None of this is hugely surprising, in fact, it was one of my main predictions for 2026:
Meta and Microsoft reboot their AI efforts – again – When Microsoft pulled off the first "hackquisition" in the form of their Inflection deal, it was clear Satya Nadella felt it was a needed gamble to hedge against their OpenAI bet, which became problematic after "The Blip". In March, we'll hit the two year anniversary of that deal and Mustafa Suleyman being charged with getting Microsoft some sort of traction in AI. With the new OpenAI arrangement giving Microsoft more flexibility, Nadella – now in "founder mode" – is clearly going to want to see some results, fast. I don't see that happening so... do they make another big hackqusition? Do something else to try to vault into the race? Meanwhile, Meta obviously just made one such deal – a second one – to try to catch up in AI after dropping the ball with Llama. I remain skeptical that they can just buy their way back in. And if it's not working, how fast does Mark Zuckerberg act yet again? Another deal?...
Well, it's March. Almost two years to the date of the Inflection buy. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. Regardless, a natural point to look back to see what is working and what is not.1 And seemingly very little is working, certainly when it comes to consumer and commercial AI.