Inside Microsoft, nobody really owns Copilot

Microsoft has been putting the Copilot brand at the center of its AI efforts for nearly a year now, trying to align the company on this idea of an AI assistant across all of its products and services. The reality behind the scenes, though, is numerous Copilots that cater to different apps and services and no single leader of Microsoft’s Copilot transformation.

That means the team responsible for Copilot inside Office apps or the dedicated Copilot mobile app isn’t the same team that’s building Copilot Studio or the various role-based Copilot offerings from Microsoft like Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service. It hasn’t yet resulted in the type of internal fighting that we’ve seen inside Microsoft in the past, where an org chart of teams pointing guns at each other accurately depicted the reality of corporate infighting a decade ago. But sources tell me there is competition brewing over the future direction of Copilot.

Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of Google DeepMind, joined Microsoft earlier this year, leading all consumer AI products and research — including Copilot, Bing, and Edge. While Suleyman continues to shape how Copilot will show up to consumers, over on the business side, there’s some interesting reshuffling going on. The Business Applications team led by Charles Lamanna has built and released Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service over the past year, which both help businesses improve their sales and customer service with the assistance of generative AI.

Lamanna is now taking on an expanded role inside Microsoft as head of the newly formed Business & Industry Copilot (BIC) org. The engineering teams responsible for Microsoft’s customer service, sales, and marketing tools will all move under Lamanna, and even Microsoft’s Cloud for Industry team, led by Satish Thomas, will report up to Lamanna. “This organizational alignment will further accelerate our business operations and copilot innovation,” said Microsoft’s Cloud and AI chief, Scott Guthrie, in an internal memo last week.

This new group will focus on Copilot inside business apps, low-code platforms, and other industry-specific tools. Microsoft has been using its Sales and Service Copilots for its own sales and customer support organizations, and the hope is that by moving a lot of the engineers behind them into a single team, the company will have the advantage of using its own tools to learn and then improve them for other businesses. In other words, they’re eating their own dog food.

Lamanna’s org also features a new Copilot Apps team, led by Vik Singh, which includes the engineers working on extensions for the Microsoft 365 Copilot: Copilot for Sales, Finance, and Service. “It is important to note that all our business apps will need to include Copilot and generative AI – not just these new Copilot apps,” says Lamanna in an internal memo.

This reshuffling under Lamanna won’t solve the issue of there not being a single engineering owner of Copilot inside Microsoft, though. Suleyman will still be responsible for the consumer side, where there’s a dedicated Copilot that’s also integrated into Bing, Edge, and Windows. Microsoft even paid for a Super Bowl commercial to market the Copilot mobile app earlier this year. The Copilot inside Office apps is also still separate from Lamanna and even Suleyman.

The business-focused Copilots that Lamanna controls are a lot less flashy, but they’re equally important as Microsoft seeks to transform every area of its business to focus on AI. After all, the Copilots for Sales and Service are actively being used by businesses that are willing to pay to use them. It looks like Microsoft is gearing up to capitalize on that AI revenue opportunity with Lamanna’s new responsibilities. Microsoft already has “over 2 million active users for our biz apps Copilots,” according to Lamanna’s memo.

I only noticed recently that Microsoft made that opportunity clear in late April, when the company quietly updated its mission statement:

Microsoft creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

That’s a lot more about AI than the mission statement contained before:

Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Lamanna’s org seems ideally positioned to create “platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions” for Microsoft’s business customers. Copilot Studio and Copilot AI agents are already promising to allow businesses and developers to build AI-powered Copilots that can work like virtual employees.

How these business-focused changes all play out for Copilot over the next 12 months will be fascinating to watch, especially as Suleyman’s work on the consumer side starts to emerge. After Microsoft’s confusing branding of its various Copilots, we could be about to witness a battle over the future direction of the company’s AI assistant.

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