Microsoft Cuts Five Copilot Features and Merges Its Apps

Microsoft is shutting down five Copilot features by August 18 and folding its two separate Copilot apps into one. If any part of your team's weekly routine runs through Deep Research, that routine has five days left in its current form.

What disappears on August 18

The features being retired are Group Chats, AI-generated podcasts, the experimental tools in Copilot Labs, Deep Research, and Mico, the app's animated character.

Deep Research users on paid professional plans are not left empty-handed: Researcher takes over the same job. Anyone using the capability on a free tier is. Microsoft has also said some features may vanish temporarily during the transition, so a gap in the middle of the migration is expected rather than a fault.

Why two apps became one

Until now Microsoft ran a consumer Copilot app alongside the business-oriented Microsoft 365 Copilot. They are becoming a single product.

The stated reasoning is unusually blunt for a company of this size. Leadership acknowledged that the two-app structure was too complicated to compete with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and that personal and professional AI use overlap in practice, which made the split artificial. The phrase used internally was that the app needed to earn the right to exist in customers' lives.

Looking at what got cut, the logic holds up. Podcast generation and an animated mascot demo well and rarely survive contact with a working day.

For corporate users, consolidation is mostly simplification. Until now the same employee's phone Copilot and desktop Microsoft 365 Copilot behaved differently, and which data sat on which side was easy to lose track of. One app removes that confusion. The trade is that personal and work usage now share an interface, which pushes the burden of keeping data boundaries clear further onto administrators.

Where your files end up

Files created in the standalone Copilot app will be migrated to OneDrive for affected users. The content is not being deleted, only relocated.

Automatic does not mean unattended, though. If a team keeps recurring reports or client material in that app, someone should confirm after the move that the folder structure and sharing permissions survived intact. In automated migrations the thing that usually goes missing is not the file. It is the record of who had access to it.

Five days, one checklist

If you run on Microsoft 365, this is a short piece of work worth doing before the deadline:

• Identify anyone using Deep Research regularly, and confirm their plan includes Researcher.
• Check whether any workflow was quietly built on a Copilot Labs experiment that nobody owns.
• After migration, verify that files moved to OneDrive are still reachable by the right people.

There is a broader point here that is not really about Microsoft. A business process anchored to a single button inside someone else's product is fragile, because the lifespan of that button is not yours to decide. Google Assistant's retirement earlier this year was the same lesson wearing different clothes.

The cheap insurance is documentation. For each process that genuinely matters, write down which step depends on which vendor feature. When one of those features is discontinued, that list turns a scramble into an afternoon's work.

Sources: TechCrunch, Microsoft