Microsoft announced on August 13 that it is collapsing its two separate Copilot apps — the consumer-facing Microsoft Copilot and the workplace-oriented Microsoft 365 Copilot — into a single application, while retiring several features it says didn't find an audience.

One app, separated accounts

Under the new structure, a person who uses both a personal and a work Microsoft account will see one unified Copilot app, though the two accounts' chats and content stay walled off from each other: work-account data doesn't flow into the personal side, and personal content stays out of an organization's Copilot environment. Per Microsoft's own support documentation, the new app begins rolling out to web and mobile users worldwide this month, with automatic URL redirects following later in August and general availability of the redesigned desktop apps targeted for mid-September.

What's being cut

Alongside the merger, Microsoft is retiring three consumer features effective August 18: Group Chats (existing group conversations get migrated into individual one-to-one chats, with history preserved), Copilot Podcasts (the feature that auto-generated audio discussions from documents and web pages), and the free version of Deep Research, Copilot's tool for producing longer, cited research reports. Microsoft has not announced a replacement or export path for Copilot Labs, its experimental-features hub, which is also being wound down.

Deep Research's paid replacement

Deep Research isn't being deleted outright — it's being replaced by a more capable tool called Researcher, which Microsoft describes as a "deeper, multistep agent" able to draw not just on the web but, in workplace settings, on a user's files, email, meetings and chats. The catch is access: starting August 18, creating new Researcher reports requires a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription at $19.99 a month. Existing saved Deep Research reports won't be deleted — premium subscribers can access them in Researcher, while personal and family-tier users can still find old reports in their chat history, just without the ability to generate new ones for free.

The move is the clearest sign yet that Microsoft is narrowing what it offers for free in Copilot while reserving its more agentic capabilities — multistep research, deep tool use — for paying subscribers, a shift that puts pressure on the free tiers of rival assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini to hold the line on capability.