In a previous post, we covered Microsoft’s plans to rebrand the Microsoft 365 app to Microsoft 365 Copilot. It’s obvious that Copilot will take center stage in the upcoming version, and a recent Microsoft 365 roadmap seen by Windows Latest gives a brief idea of what’s coming.
Firstly, the Copilot page will automatically launch when clicking the Copilot keyboard key in the Microsoft 365 app. The next big change is retiring the top header to give a more clean look to the UI. It is a big change because the right part of the bar contains profile and account-related options.
All these options will now migrate to the bottom of the left-side menu. So, you’ll need to expand the Settings and more section to access profile, feedback, and app settings.
Microsoft is also retiring the organization name header, which appeared in the top header. A valid reason for removing this is that Copilot is a tool to get the job done but not a crucial app like Word or Excel, which the organization uses most of the time.
In addition, it’ll move the AI features like Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Copilot Pages to the left sidebar in hopes of drawing more eyeballs than usual. To make space for Copilot, it’s removing the My Day and Help me Create buttons, which have no need since Copilot is a polished version for queries, summarization, and generation tasks.
You’ll also not see the Back button because Microsoft believes the tabbed interface is enough to switch between multiple apps or app pages.
Also, what about the search bar? It’s now set to appear on the homepage so you can look for content across different sections, but there are no other changes to the search bar. Only the position is changing.
All these app changes apply to both the web and desktop versions of the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. You can expect these changes to be reflected in the service from the third week of January 2025.
But are these changes helpful for the end user?
Copilot is omnipresent
Rebranding an already confusing name like Microsoft 365 to Microsoft 365 Copilot makes little sense. With all the hype this AI assistant has received for the last year or so, rarely users or organizations don’t know about it.
Even worse is renaming the simple Copilot service to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for enterprise users. That’s a too-long name and based on the little help that it offers, it’ll find very less adoption in the enterprise scenario. The URLs have also changed to reflect the name change, so users don’t get confused.
We hope that Microsoft sticks to the Copilot name until the service is discontinued (less likely as AI is omnipresent now).
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