RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from Gizmodo — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 2 sources
Microsoft is preparing to launch a super app for its AI assistant Copilot.
"Copilot is evolving rapidly from chat to Cowork to autopilots ," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the company's earnings call on Wednesday. "And this quarter, we are bringing these Copilot experiences together, including Code, in one super app spanning both consumer and commercial experiences. This is a major step forward, and I look forward to sharing more soon."
"Super apps" that combine chatbots and AI agents are all the rage, and the AI industry believes they are the direction in which AI chatbots and other consumer-facing products are naturally evolving.
OpenAI, for example, has been hinting towards a ChatGPT super app for almost a year now. " Chat is dead, " one anonymous senior OpenAI staffer told the Financial Times last month, in a report that claimed the chatbot was preparing to soon undergo its biggest overhaul since its launch to become a super app. The AI giant unveiled a version of that for employees earlier this month, a similar offering to Anthropic's Claude Cowork, which recently merged with the Claude chatbot. Super app ambitions go beyond just AI, too, with Elon Musk's ambitions to turn X into an "everything app" and similar endeavors from the likes of Uber and Airbnb .
Fortune was first to report on Microsoft's super app ambitions back in May. According to that report, the super app will combine Copilot's coding assistant, chat, coworking tools and its autonomous agents. The super app's main purpose, according to the Fortune report, is to unite the consumer and commercial sides of the product, and users will be able to toggle back and forth between personal and enterprise Copilots. It's reportedly being developed internally with the slogan "Delivering one Copilot," and is set to launch by the end of summer.
The super app is only one way that Microsoft seems to have delighted investors on Wednesday. The company's revenue grew more than analysts expected, thanks to record growth in the company's cloud business, easing some of the previous worries that Microsoft was spending obscene amounts on AI without seeing proper returns. Users are also flocking to Copilot, apparently.
"The number of conversations per user nearly doubled year over year," Nadella said. "Average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams, and the time from deployment to what we think of as high usage, meaning monthly active usage about 80% across a customer's user base, has fallen from months to just days over the past year."
CFO Amy Hood also said that the company had decided that the estimated useful life of its data centers and office buildings could be extended from 15 to 25 years. That reclassification greatly changes the math that goes into Microsoft's future earnings reports. With the shift, future data center leases will count as operating leases instead of finance leases, meaning they won't count under capital expenditures going forward.
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.