Inside Microsoft’s big Copilot rethink

深入了解微软对 Copilot 的重大战略调整

Copilot is now being positioned as the ‘OS for work.’ Copilot 现在被定位为“工作操作系统”（OS for work）。

Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hosted an intimate, invite-only event for leaders from some of its key enterprise customers. Instead of a flashy media event, Nadella outlined the future of Copilot directly to the customers Microsoft really cares about, pitching its latest rethink of the AI assistant as the “OS for work.” 上周，微软首席执行官萨提亚·纳德拉（Satya Nadella）为部分核心企业客户的领导者举办了一场私密的受邀活动。纳德拉没有选择大张旗鼓的媒体发布会，而是直接向微软真正关心的客户勾勒了 Copilot 的未来，并将这一对 AI 助手的最新构想推介为“工作操作系统”。

Microsoft is adding coding and agent capabilities directly into Copilot, as well as bringing the full power of Office into Copilot for the first time. Nadella is betting that AI will change the way people work in the same way that Microsoft Office did in the ’80s and ’90s. 微软正在将编程和智能体（Agent）功能直接集成到 Copilot 中，并首次将 Office 的全部功能引入其中。纳德拉押注 AI 将像 80 年代和 90 年代的 Microsoft Office 一样，彻底改变人们的工作方式。

“How did a multinational company do a forecast in 1981? You had interoffice memos and faxes and all of these artifacts that then just disappeared and you suddenly had an Excel spreadsheet in an email,” said Nadella. “We are the architects of a new frontier of work, using these new tools and capabilities.” “1981 年的一家跨国公司是如何做预测的？那时你有办公室备忘录、传真以及所有这些最终消失的文档，然后你突然在电子邮件中收到了一份 Excel 表格，”纳德拉说道，“我们是工作新前沿的架构师，正在利用这些新的工具和能力。”

Microsoft has spent the past few months fusing together its consumer and enterprise Copilot apps into a single unified user interface, with a goal to make Copilot as influential as Office once was. The result is a big departure from the Copilot consumer design that Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman launched two years ago. That design was heavily influenced by the work Inflection AI had done with the Pi personal AI assistant, after Microsoft hired many of the Inflection AI team just months prior. 过去几个月里，微软一直在将消费者版和企业版 Copilot 应用融合成一个统一的用户界面，目标是让 Copilot 变得像当年的 Office 一样具有影响力。其结果是，这与微软 AI 首席执行官穆斯塔法·苏莱曼（Mustafa Suleyman）两年前推出的 Copilot 消费者设计大相径庭。当时的设计深受 Inflection AI 在 Pi 个人 AI 助手方面工作的影响，而在此前几个月，微软刚刚聘用了 Inflection AI 团队的许多成员。

The new Copilot app now looks a lot more like the commercial one, with separate tabs for chat, coding, and the new Autopilot AI agent. There are some small nods to the consumer UI that was available before, but overall it looks like the type of enterprise app you’d associate with Microsoft. 新的 Copilot 应用现在看起来更像商业版，设有聊天、编程和全新的 Autopilot AI 智能体独立标签页。虽然保留了一些此前消费者界面（UI）的影子，但总体而言，它看起来更像是你印象中微软那种企业级应用。

“There’s a really important reason why we decided to do this,” said Copilot chief Jacob Andreou at Microsoft’s customer-only event last week. “The bar for enterprise software is higher than it has ever been before. The expectations we have of the tools we adopt at work are set by the things we use after hours and at the weekends at home. What this means is that consumer UX and care needs to make its way into the workplace.” “我们决定这样做有一个非常重要的原因，”Copilot 负责人雅各布·安德烈奥（Jacob Andreou）在上周的客户专属活动上表示，“企业软件的门槛比以往任何时候都要高。我们对工作中所采用工具的期望，是由我们在下班后和周末在家使用的东西所决定的。这意味着消费者级的用户体验（UX）和关怀必须进入工作场所。”

Andreou joined Microsoft AI last year, focused on product and growth. In March, Nadella appointed him as the single boss of Copilot across both commercial and consumer, reporting directly to the Microsoft CEO. He’s now responsible for the design, engineering, and growth of Copilot. 安德烈奥去年加入微软 AI，专注于产品和增长。今年 3 月，纳德拉任命他为 Copilot 商业和消费者业务的统一负责人，直接向微软 CEO 汇报。他现在负责 Copilot 的设计、工程和增长。

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Copilot plans tell me that redesigning Copilot over the last six months hasn’t been easy. There have been tensions between the team under Andreou, and those working for Charles Lamanna on the Copilot, Agents, and Platform (CAP) team. Lamanna’s team has been building Microsoft Scout, an always-on personal agent built on top of OpenClaw. Microsoft announced Scout at its Build developer conference in June, with just a desktop preview app. Less than six months later, I understand that the app has been put into maintenance mode, with Microsoft focusing on the cloud version, which has been rebranded to Autopilot. 熟悉微软 Copilot 计划的消息人士告诉我，过去六个月重新设计 Copilot 的过程并不容易。安德烈奥领导的团队与查尔斯·拉曼纳（Charles Lamanna）负责的 Copilot、智能体与平台（CAP）团队之间存在紧张关系。拉曼纳的团队一直在构建 Microsoft Scout，这是一个基于 OpenClaw 构建的常驻个人智能体。微软在 6 月的 Build 开发者大会上宣布了 Scout，当时仅有一个桌面预览版应用。不到六个月后，据我了解，该应用已被置于维护模式，微软转而专注于云版本，并将其更名为 Autopilot。

I’m told the rebrand was driven in part by legal concerns around the Scout name, as Yahoo uses “Yahoo Scout” branding for its own AI-powered features. Sources tell me Microsoft had even considered using Mico, the Clippy-like character from the consumer Copilot, to replace Scout. Nadella favored Autopilot instead, allowing Microsoft to present its AI agent in a more enterprise-friendly way, instead of a bouncing blob. 据我所知，更名部分原因是出于对“Scout”名称的法律顾虑，因为雅虎（Yahoo）在其 AI 功能中使用了“Yahoo Scout”品牌。消息人士告诉我，微软甚至曾考虑使用 Mico（消费者版 Copilot 中类似 Clippy 的角色）来取代 Scout。但纳德拉更倾向于 Autopilot，这使得微软能够以一种更符合企业需求的方式呈现其 AI 智能体，而不是一个蹦蹦跳跳的“小圆球”。

Some of Microsoft’s caution around making Autopilot too cute comes at a time when rogue AI agents are hacking into businesses. Nadella addressed these concerns last week, laying out Microsoft’s design goals for Copilot. “[It’s] about organizations having control of their firms in an age of AI, where AI by definition is a learning machine,” said Nadella. “It can’t be about leaking the core of what your firm is about.” 微软在避免将 Autopilot 设计得过于“可爱”方面表现出的谨慎，正值恶意 AI 智能体入侵企业之际。纳德拉上周回应了这些担忧，阐述了微软对 Copilot 的设计目标。“（这）关乎组织在 AI 时代如何掌控自己的公司，因为 AI 从定义上讲就是一种学习机器，”纳德拉说，“它不能导致公司核心机密的泄露。”

Andreou also admitted that agents “have been almost impossible to bring into the enterprise,” due to them needing the autonomy and flexibility that businesses usually balk at. “It is their superpower, and it’s the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin.” 安德烈奥也承认，智能体“几乎不可能进入企业”，因为它们需要自主性和灵活性，而这通常是企业所忌惮的。“这是它们的超能力，但也是让 IT 管理员感到极度恐惧的原因。”

Microsoft thinks it has solved the AI agent problem for businesses with its “OS for work,” but it also seems to be leaving the door open for competitors like Meta and OpenAI to build the “OS for life.” In a world where 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week, Microsoft is playing to its traditional business-focused strengths instead of trying to compete with consumer-friendly Muse and Dots agents. 微软认为它通过“工作操作系统”解决了企业的 AI 智能体问题，但它似乎也为 Meta 和 OpenAI 等竞争对手留下了构建“生活操作系统”的空间。在一个每周有 12 亿人使用 ChatGPT 的世界里，微软正在发挥其传统的商业优势，而不是试图与面向消费者的 Muse 和 Dots 智能体竞争。

Andreou isn’t giving up on Copilot for consumers just yet, however, and he seems to want to hone in on those that want the power of enterprise apps at home. “Microsoft consumers are a little bit special. There’s almost 90 million folks that pay for Microsoft 365 out of their own pocket,” said Andreou. “These are people who value the use of things like PowerPoint and Excel so much in their personal lives that they actually go ahead and pay for it themselves.” 不过，安德烈奥并没有放弃消费者版 Copilot，他似乎想专注于那些希望在家中也能使用企业级应用功能的用户。“微软的消费者有点特别。有近 9000 万人自掏腰包购买 Microsoft 365，”安德烈奥说，“这些人非常看重 PowerPoint 和 Excel 等工具在个人生活中的使用，以至于他们愿意自费购买。”

With Office baked into Copilot, you’ll soon be able to create and edit inside Microsoft’s AI assistant instead of having to switch to Office apps like Word and PowerPoint. There’s a full ribbon interface, and it essentially looks like the web version of Office directly inside Copilot. I think this is Microsoft’s first real acknowledgement that we’re heading to a future where AI can create a lot of the documents that people used to rely on Office for. Microsoft’s move to bring Office into Copilot has the potential to fundamentally reshape the future of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 随着 Office 被内置到 Copilot 中，你很快就能直接在微软的 AI 助手内进行创建和编辑，而无需切换到 Word 和 PowerPoint 等 Office 应用。它拥有完整的菜单栏界面，本质上看起来就像是直接嵌入在 Copilot 中的网页版 Office。我认为这是微软首次真正承认，我们正在迈向一个 AI 可以创建人们过去依赖 Office 制作的许多文档的未来。微软将 Office 引入 Copilot 的举措，有可能从根本上重塑 Word、Excel 和 PowerPoint 的未来。