Microsoft trims Copilot UI

Microsoft is pulling some Copilot buttons out of Windows 11 apps as it shifts from putting artificial intelligence everywhere to placing it in fewer, more targeted spots. (blogs.windows.com) On March 20, 2026, Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s head of Windows and Devices, said the company would cut “unnecessary Copilot entry points” in Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad, with previews rolling out to Windows Insiders in March and April. (blogs.windows.com) The first visible change has reached testers in Notepad, where the Copilot label and icon have been replaced by “Writing tools,” while the underlying rewrite, summarize, and drafting features remain. The Verge also reported that the Copilot button is no longer showing during area capture in Snipping Tool. (theverge.com) Microsoft is pairing that cleanup with a slower release process for Windows features. In its March 12 Release Preview post, the company said updates can ship in a “gradual rollout,” where features reach devices in phases instead of all at once. (blogs.windows.com) That staged approach lines up with how Microsoft has been talking about Copilot inside work software: less as a universal button, more as a tool tied to a specific task. Microsoft’s March 18 business-applications update said new releases from April 2026 through September 2026 would bring “richer, data-grounded insights” and deeper Copilot integration across roles. (microsoft.com) In Copilot Chat, Microsoft’s Prompt Gallery is now a built-in catalog of Microsoft-authored prompts, plus prompts saved by users and teams. Microsoft Learn says the gallery is available inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, and administrators can track saved, liked, and shared prompts. (learn.microsoft.com) In Power Apps, the company is expanding ways Copilot can work with Microsoft Dataverse, the cloud database behind many business apps. Microsoft says Copilot experiences in Power Apps, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365 Copilot can answer natural-language questions about Dataverse data. (learn.microsoft.com) Microsoft has also added more specific Dataverse features around summaries and record views. New documentation published in April 2026 says row summaries in model-driven apps generate short artificial-intelligence overviews of a record so users do not have to scan fields, related records, and activity timelines manually. (learn.microsoft.com) On the creation side, Microsoft published a March 2026 sample showing Power Apps components that can use code-interpreter prompts to generate previews and downloads for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Portable Document Format files. That is a narrower use of Copilot than the Windows push, but it fits Microsoft’s current pattern of tying the tool to a defined workflow. (learn.microsoft.com) The net change is not that Microsoft is backing away from Copilot altogether. It is renaming, relocating, and narrowing the assistant so Windows looks less crowded while Microsoft 365 and Power Apps keep adding features aimed at specific jobs. (blogs.windows.com)