Microsoft Copilot super app unifies AI tools as adoption lags

Microsoft is building a single Copilot super app to unify its fragmented artificial intelligence tools, Fortune has reported, folding code generation, chat and agentic workflows into one experience.

The project is led by Jacob Andreou, the former Snap executive appointed Copilot chief in March, and is expected to reach users by late northern summer. Andreou was hired to merge Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise Copilot teams, which until now ran as separate divisions with overlapping products. Customers found the sprawl hard to navigate.

“Microsoft has found that customers dislike shifting between its Copilot tools, and the company also seeks for people to see more value from Copilot,” sources told Fortune.

The super app would combine four products: GitHub Copilot, the code-generation tool with 4.7 million paid subscribers; Copilot Chat, the consumer and enterprise chatbot; Copilot Cowork, the recently launched collaborative AI agent; and Autopilot, a new agentic workflow tool that would let users set multi-step tasks to run autonomously.

The consolidation follows months of uneven adoption. Fewer than 4.5 per cent of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot features, according to Fortune’s sources. That is a small fraction, even for a product still in its enterprise rollout. GitHub Copilot, meanwhile, has become one of the fastest-selling developer tools in the company’s history.

The super app is also Microsoft’s most direct shot at mobile. The company dominates desktop operating systems globally but has never built a consumer mobile presence that stuck. A single Copilot experience spanning desktop, web and phone would put the company on the screen people reach for first.

Redesign sets the stage

The project lands alongside a broader Copilot redesign in Microsoft 365, detailed by The Verge this week. The update, overseen by chief design officer Jon Friedman, strips back the interface to a dashboard and uses progressive disclosure, showing users only the controls that matter to the task at hand.

“Rather than presenting every path at once, this design organises what matters first and reveals more capability in context,” Friedman said.

The redesign has produced an early bump. In its first week, Copilot usage in Word rose 27 per cent, Excel 33 per cent, PowerPoint 43 per cent and Outlook 30 per cent. Microsoft cautioned the data is short-term and has not controlled for novelty effects, The Register reported.

Competitive heat

The super app push arrives as competitive pressure on Microsoft’s AI unit grows. Google has integrated its Gemini model into Workspace. Anthropic’s Claude is gaining traction in enterprise accounts. And OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested US$13 billion ($19.8 billion), is behaving more like a direct rival than a partner.

Andreou’s job is to make Copilot the product people open first, not the one their employer bought by default. As Sherwood News noted, Microsoft is counting on the mass adoption of GitHub Copilot to lift its slower-growing siblings.

Microsoft may preview pieces of the super app at its Build developer conference next week. AI chief Mustafa Suleyman is also expected to unveil new proprietary AI models that would cut the company’s dependence on OpenAI.

For Australian enterprise IT teams, which rank among the heaviest Microsoft 365 and GitHub users per capita globally, the super app points to a simpler licensing and deployment picture. It also concentrates the risk: if the unified experience does not deliver, the disappointment will be unified too.