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Microsoft began rolling out its unified Copilot app to a group of Windows Insiders on August 13 — the first concrete deployment step in a restructuring it announced in July — and consumers who use the standalone Copilot app now have four days to rescue content they cannot get back. Starting August 18, Group Chat threads and the images inside them will be permanently deleted, Copilot Podcasts will be retired with no way to access previously shared links, and Deep Research — the feature that generated long, web-sourced reports — will stop working for every user who does not hold a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription at $19.99 a month.
What Is Changing and Why It Matters Now
The August 13 rollout began with Windows Insiders receiving updates first. A broader worldwide deployment of the mobile and web apps is expected in mid-August, with Windows and Mac desktop apps following in mid-September. Mobile users will need to download an updated version of the app. Users will see changes at different times, and Microsoft says that variation is expected.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot app — which until now targeted business users separately — will be rebranded as Microsoft Copilot with a new icon, and its commercial web address will move from m365.cloud.microsoft to copilot.cloud.microsoft, with automatic redirects beginning in late August. For enterprise users, Microsoft describes most visible changes as cosmetic: a new name, a new icon, a new web address.
Consumer users face the steeper transition. Several features that defined the standalone Copilot experience are being shut off in four days. Chat history, images, and other content created in the consumer app will migrate to the new one. Files shared with or generated by Copilot will move to OneDrive for storage, where additional storage requires a paid plan.
What You Need to Do Before August 18
Three specific content types will not survive the transition unless users act before the deadline:
Copilot Podcasts: Each individual podcast file must be downloaded from your podcast library before August 18. After that date, the feature is retired entirely and any shared podcast links stop working — there is no bulk-export option and Microsoft will not restore access after the deadline.
Group Chat: All Group Chat threads, messages, and images are permanently deleted on August 18. Users must manually copy or download anything they want to keep before then.
Deep Research reports you want to create in the future: Existing Deep Research reports remain accessible in chat history. However, after August 18, consumers who do not hold a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription at $19.99 a month will lose the ability to start new ones.
Also note that Copilot Health and Shopping may be temporarily unavailable during the transition period for some users. Microsoft says Health will return, and heavy Health users will be migrated later so the feature is waiting for them when they arrive.
What Losing Deep Research Actually Means
Deep Research was the most analytically capable feature available on Copilot’s free tier: it accepted a complex question, spent several minutes browsing the web and gathering sources, and returned a structured, cited report. For users who relied on it — researchers, students, journalists, anyone who needed a synthesized starting point on a new topic — it was the clearest example of AI delivering something useful that required genuine time and effort to produce manually.
As of August 18, that capability becomes a paid product. The replacement, called Researcher, is available only to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers. Researcher offers deeper integration with Microsoft 365 data — it can pull from your emails, calendar, and files — which makes it more powerful for users already inside the Microsoft ecosystem, but it is not available to users on the Personal or Family plans ($6.99/month and $9.99/month respectively). The gap between what those subscribers had yesterday and what they can access tomorrow is the most significant immediate financial consequence of the consolidation.
This is not the first time Microsoft has moved a free AI capability behind a paywall in recent months — and it is unlikely to be the last. For free-tier users who relied on Deep Research and are now being asked to pay $19.99 a month to replace it, ChatGPT and Perplexity’s free tiers currently offer comparable research capability without requiring a subscription upgrade. This is the competitive pressure the consolidation creates that Microsoft’s own framing does not name.
Microsoft says free-tier capacity limits will tighten, describing the service as available “subject to capacity and limits.” That phrasing is new. It signals that some free users will hit usage limits sooner than they do today and that the ceiling on free Copilot chat is no longer defined by Microsoft’s own earlier messaging.
Mico Is Done
Also disappearing on August 18: Mico, the expressive animated blob Microsoft introduced less than a year ago to accompany Copilot’s voice mode. Mico was unusual in the AI assistant space — a character designed to give voice interactions a visual presence — and it leaves without a direct replacement in the core consumer experience. Microsoft expects Mico to live on in education features, but its role as the face of consumer Copilot is over.
How Work and Personal Stay Separate — and What IT Teams Need to Check
Users who hold both a personal Microsoft account and a work or school Microsoft 365 account will be able to sign in to both and toggle between them in the unified app. Microsoft says data will not flow between the two accounts, employers will not be able to see personal account activity, and enterprise security, compliance, and administrative controls will remain unchanged. A color-coded system will help users confirm which account context is currently active.
For IT administrators, one non-automatic change requires immediate attention. Organizations that had configured Windows’ Recall feature — which periodically captures screenshots of a user’s activity for AI-powered searching — to exclude the old Copilot app from those captures will need to reapply the Recall exclusion manually. The setting will not transfer automatically. Organizations with Windows Recall deployed and the old Copilot app excluded should add the new unified app to that exclusion list before users begin experiencing the update.
What Is Not Yet the Super App
This week’s unification is a prerequisite for, not the arrival of, the Super App Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described during the company’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on July 29. The full Super App will bring together Copilot’s chat, AI coding capability, the Cowork research tool, and new AutoPilot agents — background AI agents that can execute tasks autonomously across Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive — into a single product. Nadella said the Super App would ship “this quarter,” meaning by the end of September 2026.
The technical reason AutoPilot will cost extra, when pricing is disclosed, is worth understanding now. A conventional Copilot chat query requires one model call. An AutoPilot agent running a background task — monitoring email, coordinating calendars, managing a recurring document workflow — may require 10 to 20 separate model calls per action, because each call must transmit a full context window back to the model. According to a Gartner estimate from March 2026, agentic tasks require 5 to 30 times more computing resources than standard chatbot queries. This is why the agent tier will carry a separate price rather than being included in the base subscription.
The engineering effort building the unified app runs under the internal codename “Copilot Fusion” — a single codebase replacing separate authentication tracks that previously required a different sign-in for consumer and enterprise identities.
What This Is a Response To
The restructuring was set in motion by Jacob Andreou, the former Snap executive Microsoft CEO Nadella elevated to lead Copilot in March 2026, following a reorganization that shifted Mustafa Suleyman — who had run consumer AI — to a narrower role focused on building Microsoft’s in-house MAI frontier models. Andreou detailed the direction in a memo to his 11,000-person organization in early July, citing the need to move on from features that were not gaining users, and to earn the right to exist in customers’ lives.
The numbers driving that memo are clear. Microsoft 365 Copilot surpassed 30 million paid seats as of the company’s most recent quarter — up from 20 million in April, with net seat additions more than doubling quarter over quarter. That sounds strong, but 30 million amounts to roughly 7 percent of the more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 paid seats the company reported in January. On the consumer side, Microsoft does not disclose how many people use the consumer Copilot app, but Sensor Tower estimated 38.5 million monthly Copilot users in July — a fraction of ChatGPT’s 1 billion monthly users.
The unification is Microsoft’s bet that fewer, better-integrated products will generate the engagement that a fragmented portfolio did not.
Is Microsoft Copilot Still Free to Use?
Yes — core Copilot chat remains free, with no announced plan to change that. But the free tier is narrowing. The August 18 changes remove Deep Research from the no-cost tier, tighten capacity limits, and make Researcher — Deep Research’s more powerful replacement — available only at $19.99 a month. The Copilot app itself remains downloadable and free; what changes is what you can do inside it without paying.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat features is Microsoft removing from Copilot on August 18?
Three features are being retired on August 18, 2026: Copilot Podcasts (which auto-generated audio discussions from websites and documents), Group Chat (including all threads, messages, and images in group conversations), and Deep Research (which generated long, cited reports from web sources). Mico, the animated voice-mode companion, is also being retired from the core consumer experience. Deep Research is not being deleted — existing reports remain in chat history — but the ability to create new ones will require a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription at $19.99 a month.
What is replacing Deep Research in Copilot, and who can access it?
The replacement is a feature called Researcher, which offers the same type of in-depth, cited reports as Deep Research — plus deeper integration with Microsoft 365 data including emails, calendars, and files. Researcher is available to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers ($19.99/month) and users with Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial licenses. It is not included in the Microsoft 365 Personal ($6.99/month) or Family ($9.99/month) plans. For consumers who used Deep Research but do not want to pay $19.99 a month for Microsoft 365 Premium, comparable research capability is available at no cost in ChatGPT and Perplexity’s current free tiers.
How do I save my Copilot Podcasts before August 18?
Open the Copilot app and navigate to your podcast library. Each episode must be downloaded individually before August 18, 2026. There is no bulk-export option. After August 18, previously shared podcast links will also stop working permanently — recipients of those links will no longer be able to access the audio. If you have shared Copilot Podcast links with others, those listeners should be notified that access will end on August 18.
What is the Microsoft Copilot Super App and when will it arrive?
The Super App is Microsoft’s planned consolidation of Copilot chat, AI coding tools, the Cowork research platform, and AutoPilot background agents into a single unified product serving both consumer and business users. The current August 13 rollout — which merges the consumer and Microsoft 365 apps into one unified experience — is the structural foundation for the Super App but is not the Super App itself. CEO Satya Nadella confirmed on the company’s July 29, 2026 earnings call that the Super App will ship “this quarter” — meaning by the end of September 2026.