Microsoft Copilot
About
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant. It started life as Bing Chat in February 2023 and was renamed Copilot later that year. Today it runs as a free app on the web, Windows, macOS and mobile, and inside Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for paying subscribers.
People use Copilot for everyday questions, web-grounded answers, drafting and rewriting text, creating images and getting help inside their Office documents. Its main advantage is reach: it is built into Windows and the Microsoft 365 apps that many offices already run on.
As of October 2026, the Copilot app is free. Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook comes with Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 a month, Family, or Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month, which replaced the old $20 Copilot Pro plan in late 2025. Businesses add Microsoft 365 Copilot to an eligible Microsoft 365 business licence.
Features and integrations
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Copilot Chat: Answers questions, explains topics and drafts text in a conversational app, with web search built in so answers can include links to current sources.
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Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps: Drafts documents in Word, analyses data and builds formulas in Excel, creates slides in PowerPoint and summarises email threads in Outlook for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
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Image Creation: Generates images from text prompts inside the Copilot app, useful for quick illustrations, social graphics and presentation visuals.
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Voice and Vision: Supports spoken conversation and can look at images or your screen in supported apps to answer questions about what you are seeing.
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Windows Integration: Copilot is built into Windows, so users can open it from the taskbar or keyboard and get help without switching to a browser.
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Researcher and Analyst Agents: Microsoft 365 Premium adds advanced agents that run deeper research and data analysis tasks across the web and your files.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Built into Windows and Office: Copilot works inside the operating system and the Microsoft 365 apps many people already use, so there is little new software to learn.
- Free app to start: The standalone Copilot app is free, which makes it easy to try before paying for Office integration.
- Good value bundle: Microsoft 365 plans combine Office apps, cloud storage and Copilot, which can cost less than buying an AI subscription and storage separately.
- Strong for business documents: Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint saves time on routine drafting, summarising and formatting work.
Cons
- Confusing plan structure: Copilot features are spread across free, consumer and business plans, and Microsoft has renamed and repackaged them several times.
- Office features need a subscription: Copilot inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint requires a paid Microsoft 365 plan, not just the free app.
- Less value outside Microsoft: People who use Google Workspace or Apple apps get far less from Copilot than Microsoft 365 users.
Founder
Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Founder, Microsoft
Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft in 1975. Microsoft launched its AI chat assistant as Bing Chat in February 2023, built on technology from its partnership with OpenAI, and rebranded it as Copilot later that year.
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Last updated October 5, 2026