Less than half a decade after Microsoft rebranded Office 365 to Microsoft 365, the company has announced it will ditch the now-familiar Microsoft 365 logo in favor of its AI tool, Copilot.
During day one of the November 2024 Microsoft Ignite event, Rajesh Jha, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices Group, said, “It has been one year since we made Microsoft 365 Copilot available. Usage has grown, and customers are rapidly deploying and adapting it.” He continued, “When we launched Copilot, we integrated it into the applications—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams—that hundreds of millions of people use every day, giving people powerful AI right in the flow of their work. We continue to integrate Copilot across apps and services, from OneNote to Stream, Forms to OneDrive, and more.”
Delving deeper into Microsoft’s plans, Jha highlighted Copilot’s “deep integration into the Microsoft 365 applications,” saying, “Over the next couple of months, we will change the Microsoft 365 application icon to the new Microsoft 365 Copilot icon. You will continue to see us bring more and more Copilot capabilities and native AI to this application. This truly makes the application a front door to Copilot.”
Despite Jha’s enthusiastic build-up to the new logo, it somewhat disappointingly features just the Copilot logo with a text box containing a “M365” label stamped over the top. The Microsoft 365 shape in the Copilot colors might have been a better option.
Aside from the unavoidable AI trend in modern technology and society, Jha justified Microsoft’s focus on Copilot by saying that Microsoft continues to “add features, both for end users and for IT for better governance and management.” He also explained that Copilot’s performance is witnessing dramatic improvements, with “Copilot responses now more than two times faster on average, and response satisfaction has improved by nearly three times.”
So far, Microsoft Copilot has had mixed reviews. Indeed, some people enjoy the challenge ofcreating a complex Excel spreadsheet without the assistance of AI, while others appreciate how ithelps them to improve their work. There’s no doubt, however, that AI is here to stay—and Microsoft is trying its hardest to place itself at the forefront of its development.
