Microsoft’s Jacob Andreou, the company’s Executive Vice President of Copilot, recently sat down for a detailed interview about what the tech giant has learned from its AI assistant rollout. The candid conversation reveals a company that has changed direction significantly after realising that more AI touchpoints don’t automatically mean more value.
Cutting back to go further
Microsoft removed Copilot from several Windows applications after discovering they generated traffic without delivering meaningful value. Andreou admitted he experienced the same frustration as a user of his own company’s consumer agent.
“We had to relearn that putting more people into the top of the funnel doesn’t equal delivering more value to them,” Andreou explained. “We picked a bunch of entry points that looked high traffic but were relatively low value. There were even a couple places where you could be using your Windows machine and then suddenly, Copilot. That doesn’t help anyone.”
The executive now advocates for products earning their right to exist. “Usage is fleeting unless you’re delivering real value,” he said. The result? Fewer entry points but more usage per user and more people actively choosing to engage.
The personal agent experience
Andreou shared how using Copilot Tasks in the consumer product initially felt magical. He was ordering food delivery and calling Ubers automatically when meetings ended. But the novelty wore off.
“For the harder stuff in my life, like financial planning or planning a vacation around work commitments, it was kind of an inch deep,” he said. “That was a big learning for me: something that was cool in the early days needs more meat to be something I feel amazing about using.”
He expects other consumer agents launching this year, including those from competitors, to hit similar walls and evolve over time.
Why this matters for the AI industry
As companies race to embed AI into every product imaginable, Microsoft’s experience offers a counterintuitive lesson. Reducing the number of AI touchpoints actually increased engagement. The factor that keeps users returning is not surface-level convenience but genuine utility beneath the initial interaction.
This finding challenges the prevailing approach of saturating software with AI features and suggests that quality of experience matters far more than quantity of access points.
