When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. It was inevitable: Microsoft plans to carve out space on the Windows 11 taskbar for Copilot, while adding "Hey Copilot" as a wake word to trigger interactions with its AI. While the company isn't making any overt changes to the branding of Windows 11, its executives this week spoke about reinventing the "AI PC," the first generation of PCs it launched with early NPUs. Microsoft plans to make PCs smarter, including agents that can take actions and granting Copilot Vision more powers. Adding Copilot to the taskbar will actually be the most visible change to the Windows 11 user interface.

We've been hearing rumblings for months now that Microsoft was working on so-called "AI PCs." At a pre-Build event, the company spelled out its vision for AI PCs. Microsoft is calling its version Copilot PCs, which CEO Satya Nadella described as a "new class of Windows PCs." These include hardware designed to handle more generative AI Copilot processes locally, rather than relying on the cloud. That requires a chipset with a neural processing unit (NPU) and manufacturers such as Qualcomm have been laying the groundwork with chips like the Snapdragon X Elite.

Microsoft and its PC partners plan to add a "Copilot" key to your PC keyboards, making it easy and intuitive to launch Microsoft's Copilot AI -- and avoid using an AI solution from a competitor. PC makers appear to be prepping to replace one of the existing buttons in the no-man's land grouping of keys to the right of the PC spacebar into a key that will launch Copilot on command. "Over the coming days leading up to and at CES, you will start to see the Copilot key on many of the new Windows 11 PCs from our ecosystem partners, with availability beginning in late February through spring, including on upcoming Surface devices," Yusuf Mehdi, who now oversees the Windows and Surface businesses after the departure of Panos Panay, wrote in a blog post. Copilot is available in Windows, of course, and it's now officially available on iOS and Android as well. Early looks at the new PCs indicate that the new key could potentially replace the "menu" key on some Windows PCs like Microsoft Surface devices, which are rarely used.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. This week, Microsoft and Google introduced generative A.I. tools that make attending meetings, writing emails, scheduling travel, and catching up on projects vastly easier. The products channel the wonder of buzzy A.I. products like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Bard into clear, applicable uses. And these obvious uses just happen to be in the workplace. About a year into the generative A.I. phenomenon, it's becoming evident that the technology is most useful in enterprise first, with broader consumer adoption perhaps to follow.

"Panos Panay" may not be an anagram for "passion," but at Microsoft, it was pretty darn close. Panos Panay, the chief product officer for Microsoft, unexpectedly stepped down on Tuesday, after serving nearly twenty years at the company. Panay rose to the ranks of chief product officer, overseeing the development of Windows and its complementary Surface PC line. Interestingly, Panay gave no specific reason for leaving, and at press time had only posted a single message announcing his departure on Twitter/X. Even more interestingly, Panay had originally said he would oversee the launch of Microsoft's next Surface devices at an event this week, on Sept. 21.

A Microsoft spokesperson is typing something into a search engine, and it isn't quite working. I'm watching this unfold at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan that's meant to show off new features on Bing, the company's Google rival. In this demonstration, a chatbot is supposed to respond to a user's query with an embedded video. Typing on a large computer monitor in full view of several journalists, the staffer asks the program for instructions to tie a tie. But instead of a video, Bing generates an absurd heap of text--so many words about looping and knotting fabric set against a sterile white speech bubble.

Jordi Ribas hasn't taken a day off since last September. That month, the Microsoft search and AI chief got the keys to GPT-4, a then secret version of OpenAI's text-generation technology that now powers ChatGPT. As Ribas had with GPT-4's predecessors, the Barcelona native wrote in Spanish and Catalan to test the AI's knowledge of cities like his hometown and nearby Manresa. When quizzed about history, churches, and museums, its responses hit the mark. Then he asked GPT-4 to solve an electronics problem about the current flowing through a circuit.

Over the past few days, users have reported seeing ads within the Bing chatbot experience. Based on the limited examples we've seen, the GPT-4-powered chatbot embeds relevant ad links in responses to users' actual questions. Ads don't seem to show up for most people (including us) yet, but they'll most likely pop up more frequently and in more places soon. In a new post on the Bing blog, Microsoft Corporate VP for Search and Devices Yusuf Mehdi has admitted that the company is currently exploring putting ads in Bing's chat experience, indicating that the samples we've seen so far are part of its experimentation. He also revealed how the company intends to embed more ads in the new Bing experience.

Microsoft has given its Bing AI chatbot the ability to generate images by simply describing the picture in a few words. The tool -- Bing Image Creator, announced Tuesday -- can generate written and visual content in seconds. "We know from research that the human brain processes visual information about 60,000 times faster than text, making visual tools a critical way people search, create and gain understanding," Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president & consumer chief marketing officer, wrote in a blog post. "Based on Bing data, images are one of the most searched categories – second only to general web searches." Historically, Mehdi wrote, search was limited to images that already existed on the web, and now there are almost no limits to what people can search for and create.

Bing has crossed 100 million daily active users a month after the launch of its chatbot AI, according to Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's VP for Modern Life, Search and Devices. He said the company is fully aware that it's still just "a small, low, single digit share player," but hey, there was a time when Bing wasn't even a part of the conversation. Now, after the tech giant released its next-gen version, even those who haven't used it in the past are relying on it for their searches: Mehdi noted that one-third of Bing's daily active users are new to the search engine. "We see this appeal of the new Bing as a validation of our view that search is due for a reinvention and of the unique value proposition of combining Search Answers Chat Creation in one experience," the VP said. In addition to seeing a boost in numbers, Microsoft is also apparently enjoying a growth in engagement, with more people conducting more searches. The company credits two factors for that particular victory, the first being Edge's growth in usage, most likely aided by the addition of Bing's chat AI as a new feature.