Almost 3 years later, it's time to admit that Microsoft Copilot was a mistake

Look, Microsoft: sometimes we all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are small, and sometimes they’re huge, multi-year debacles that annoy millions of people and fundamentally damage the functionality of your flagship product.

I am, of course, referring to the elephant in the room that is Microsoft Copilot, the AI-powered assistant that is now heavily baked into multiple aspects of not just Windows 11, but the broader range of Microsoft products as a whole. Microsoft Word, Outlook, the Edge browser, the 365 suite, and even the File Explorer (where Microsoft recently gave users the option to remove it entirely, because it was still hanging around even if you disabled AI actions in the Windows Settings menu).

Now, I’m not going to make such a bold claim as ‘Copilot is wildly unpopular’, but the AI tool has clearly proved divisive at best among users ...