Remember when Microsoft promised that the Copilot key would be the next big thing? Since then Microsoft has begun backing away from its Copilot app, and this week the company is promising that Copilot won’t even launch when you tap the key — just a subset of the app will.

This “new experience” for Copilot won’t feature the full-fledged Copilot app. Instead, Microsoft is promising that the Copilot key — or, in future, the WIN+C shortcut — will launch Copilot Chat, a small chat box that won’t take up as much screen space as before.

Cool, right? But even this new experience isn’t free from Microsoft’s fragmentation problems, which puts separate features on separate tracks. Microsoft has two Copilot experiences: the “consumer” version of Copilot, and the more professional Copilot experience as Microsoft 365 Copilot. This week, Microsoft began reworking that latter version of Copilot to bring it more in line with the consumer application, which allows for image creation. Microsoft 365 Copilot is adding project-based Notebooks and other features, such as improved AI search and an “agent store” for sending out AI to do more specific tasks.

It’s Microsoft 365 Copilot that’s receiving the less obtrusive interface. In May, Microsoft said it will launch “an updated Copilot key experience,” which will launch a “prompt box” using Copilot Chat. While the app can be expanded into the full Copilot app, it’s designed to offer a minimal interface at launch.

If you have a Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise PC with a Copilot key, and the Copilot key is mapped to the full Microsoft 365 Copilot app, you’ll see this behavior change, too, as part of a Windows update. Put another way, you’ll have to launch the Copilot Chat app, then launch the full-screen app if that’s the way you work. (If you’ve already mapped the Copilot key to some other app or function, that won’t change.) It’s not clear what will happen to the Alt+Space shortcut.

Microsoft’s blog post says that the key changes are being pushed to “organizations,” implying that business customers may be the first group to receive the change. But it wouldn’t be surprising if it migrated into the consumer space, too.

Microsoft has waffled between making Copilot a web app, and then a native one; and the Copilot key can now be remapped to other functions on consumer PCs, too. Microsoft probably correctly feels that businesses don’t want an omnipresent Copilot app taking over their screen when they tap the Copilot key. But there’s sure to be a set of consumers who feel the same way, too.

Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld