Bing Chat is renamed Microsoft Copilot

Background

Bing Chat had launched in February 2023 as part of the redesigned Bing and Edge. By autumn the company had also started using the name Microsoft Copilot across its products, which created overlapping names for the same assistant.

What happened

On 15 November 2023 Microsoft announced that Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise would become Copilot.^[1] Copilot got its own site at copilot.microsoft.com, while Bing.com kept combined search and chat.^[1]

The rename followed an earlier announcement. On 21 September 2023 Microsoft had introduced Microsoft Copilot as one experience across Windows, Edge, Bing and Microsoft 365. Copilot began rolling out in Windows 11 on 26 September 2023.^[2]

Key details

Copilot with commercial data protection became generally available on 1 December 2023. It was offered to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, Business Premium and A3/A5 faculty licences. Prompts and responses were not saved or used to train the models.^[1]

Microsoft said Copilot was based on the latest OpenAI models, including GPT-4 and DALL·E 3.^[1]

Copilot Studio, a low-code tool for building custom copilots, launched the same month.^[3]

Impact

The rename turned a search feature into a separate assistant brand. Consumer use and business use began to share one name, and the business version carried commercial data protection terms.^[1][2][3]

Why one name

A company with several AI products can end up with the same assistant named differently in each one. This makes it hard for users to know what they are using and hard for the company to explain what it offers. By giving the chat assistant the name Copilot and a standalone site, Microsoft separated the assistant from the search engine, while keeping the search engine's combined search and chat experience on Bing.com.^[1]

What the business version added

Commercial data protection is the set of contractual and technical rules that govern how a company's data is handled by an AI service. For the business version, the important point in the announcement is that prompts and responses were not saved or used to train the models. This matters for organisations that cannot send internal documents to a service that might reuse them.^[1]

Related products

The rename happened alongside other product work. Copilot Studio, which allows people to build their own copilots with little or no coding, launched in the same month, so the rename and the new tool appeared in the same month.^[3]