Microsoft seems like it might be pulling back from a strategy limiting its latest AI functionality to just Copilot+ PCs armed with a dedicated NPU. If so, that could be a profound reversal of policy from the last two years.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced a slew of new AI improvements that will apply to all Windows 11 PCs, including Copilot Actions, which allow AI agents to perform tasks on your behalf. Microsoft also made tweaks to Copilot, adding a “Hey Copilot” wake word and connected apps, as well as placing Copilot on the Windows 11 taskbar.
Yusuf Mehdi, the chief consumer officer for Microsoft and an executive vice president, confirmed that none of the new Copilot functions require a Copilot+ PC, which includes an NPU with 40 TOPS or more. (The exception is an integration with Zoom on Click to Do, in which a user can right-click an email address or group of email addresses and create a Zoom meeting invitation.) The blog post in which the new features were announced was titled “Making every Windows 11 PC an AI PC.”
Microsoft’s goal, Mehdi said, was to rebuild the AI PC. “We really feel that the vision that we have is, let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC,” he told reporters.
Copilot Actions in action.
Microsoft
“We’ve been now on this AI PC journey for probably three, four years,” Mehdi said. “Prior to that, we had multiple years of innovation that began publicly with our Copilot+ PC push that happened about a year and a half ago, where we essentially rewrote the operating system from the ground up, from the chip all the way to the cloud, to optimize battery, to optimize performance, to introduce new on device NPUs, so that you can run AI locally.”
The AI PC was Microsoft’s first foray into AI, oriented around Intel’s Core Ultra Series 1 (Meteor Lake), the AMD Ryzen 8040 series, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. Only Qualcomm’s chip delivered 45 TOPS, over the threshold for the Copilot+ PCs that Microsoft and others started delivering in 2024.
At the time, Copilot+ PCs sounded like the next big thing. Over time, it seemed like the Copilot+ tent would expand to include more and more PCs as chipmakers simply made newer chips with dedicated NPUs and more TOPS. But Mehdi didn’t sound as committed when talking to reporters.
“We did all of this years of work that let us get to the point of understanding what’s the right way to bring AI in,” Mehdi said. “We’ve learned a lot from that — you know, what features resonate. And one of the big things that I think really came to us is, while Copilot+ PCs really are the tip of the spear and are gaining, you know, fast traction, the big thing was, let’s bring that AI capability to all Windows 11 PCs, and make it really simple for anyone to try it. So that has been the big thing.”
It’s not quite the ringing endorsement of Copilot+ PCs that you woud expect to hear from one of the Microsoft executives who launched the Copilot+ initiative in the first place. But it makes sense, too.
Was Copilot+ too niche for Microsoft’s ambitions?
A dedicated Copilot key on a laptop keyboard.
IDG / Mark Hachman
Put simply, Copilot+ PCs bombed in their first year, and there’s no reason to believe that sales shot up while Microsoft was trying to solve the problems around Recall. Mehdi told reporters that the “top feature” on Copilot+ PCs is semantic search, not Recall, but that’s still limited to Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors.
But as we pointed out in 2024, the most powerful NPU is a GPU. An NPU’s strength is performing AI-optimized tasks effectively to maximize battery life, but the best LLMs and the most powerful generative AI art still runs best on a GPU if power isn’t an issue.
It would make sense, then, if Microsoft were to de-emphasize local AI in order to favor a more all-encompassing message. But to do so would mean somewhat ditching Copilot+ and intrinsically discarding the accomplishments of its chip partners. Intel and Qualcomm just spent several days talking about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) as well as the Snapdragon X2 Elite, respectively, after all. That would be a shocking reversal of the marketing message used by virtually all of the PC industry for most of the past few years.
Microsoft didn’t address a PCWorld question whether Microsoft’s more inclusive stance toward AI also meant that it was moving away from Copilot+ and local AI. To be fair, Microsoft’s blog post ended with recommendations for new PCs to replace older Windows 10 hardware that officially ended support this week. All were Copilot+ PCs.
Still, of the two blog posts Microsoft issued in support of its new Copilot features, the term “Copilot+” was used just a single time, to describe the Zoom integration into Click to Do. The term “NPU”? It didn’t appear. Not once.
