Microsoft is betting big that Windows users will want to talk to their computers, have their device engage them in conversation, and be able to ask the operating system’s smarts to undertake tasks for them on a Windows device.
In a briefing with The Verge, Yusuf Mehdi, consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, described the continuing moves to integrate AI into the Windows operating system as, “the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot [but] gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day.”
While Mehdi’s remit is the consumer space, it’s not difficult to envisage the habits users develop at home percolating into the workplace. It’s happened before, of course, most notably in the use of personal devices – typically mobile phones and tablets – at work. In that instance, IT teams had to shift from an outright ban on third-party devices on corporate networks, through a grudging management of unsolicited devices via BYOD policies, to the current situation where personal devices are at least accepted, and in some cases, fully-embraced by organisations.
The stakes with which Microsoft is playing are high. Its investment in AI (around $80bn in data centres alone in 2025) means it’s adding AI capabilities to every aspect of its user-facing software, with the sight of Copilot icons in Office 365 and Windows 11 increasingly common. The company is hoping that users will grow so accustomed to and reliant on using AI features, they’ll want to continue using it, even when licence fees inevitably rise. By embedding AI everywhere it can now, Microsoft will, it hopes, be able to recoup the billions of investment it’s been making in AI infrastructure and software.
The company aims to “rewrite the entire operating system around AI,” Mehdi said. It certainly has a track record of changing its offerings to embrace new technology, with some notable failures among its successes. Microsoft owes its position as one of the world’s biggest companies to its production of a window-ed operating system at a time when using a computer meant typing text, word by word, into a terminal interface.
But a few decades later, Microsoft went all-in on the latest in hardware at the time: touchscreens. It produced the much-derided Windows 8, yet quickly had to roll back its touch-first elements, returning the Start menu to the bottom of millions of disgruntled users’ screens. Latterly, voice assistant Cortana quietly died due to user disinterest (Cortana as a voice assistant reached end-of-life in 2023), and the less said about the security implications of the initial version of Windows Recall the better.
Microsoft now wants to convince Windows users that talking to their computers is the best way to get things done digitally. “All the data that we see is when people use voice, they love it,” Mehdi said. Behind the feature is, of course, AI, parsing voice into instructions and text, and translating activities and results back into speech.
But is voice control of computers just another way that Microsoft can justify adding AI to its software?
Like any piece of technology, AI does have its uses for certain tasks. But to many, it seems unlikely that large, open-plan offices ring with the sound of office workers giving instructions to their laptops. Given the nascence of AI at present, it’s also difficult to see a wholesale trust in AI’s agentic capabilities, despite them being on offer in many aspects of digital life. The agentic AI of Copilot Actions simply can’t be allowed to do anything that may cause controversy (after the PR disaster of Windows Recall), yet a version with limited capabilities is unlikely to fire the interest of a new generation of Windows users
Copilot Vision and Copilot Actions are currently only available on Copilot Labs, so it’s probable that the experiences of those taking part in the speech enablement Labs will inform any final version of what Yusuf Mehdi is framing as the next paradigm in computer-human interactions. We may soon all be chatting to our friendly desktop assistants at home, but whether our companions make it into work with us remains uncertain.
(Image source: “shout” by Another side of yukita is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.)
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