Microsoft removes Copilot entry points from Photos, Notepad, and Windows Widgets

Microsoft began rolling back aggressive Copilot integration into Windows. The company is removing buttons and entry points to the AI assistant from standard applications—Photos, Widgets, Notepad, and several others. This move looks like a quiet admission of error.

After Microsoft systematically embedded Copilot everywhere it could reach in 2023–2024—in the taskbar, Edge browser, Paint, Word, Outlook, and Teams—user reaction proved cooler than expected. The Copilot button on new keyboards turned out to be unnecessary, widgets proved irritating, and the built-in image generation in Photos remained a rarely used feature. Microsoft is not the first to make such a rollback.

In 2024, the company removed the Copilot sidebar from the main Windows 11 interface, moving it to a separate application. Now it continues the cleanup: AI entry points are being removed from Photos, Widgets, Notepad, and several other applications. The specific list is not detailed, but the direction is clear—Copilot stops being an intrusive neighbor and returns to the role of a tool on demand.

For understanding the scale: Copilot is a repackaging of several Microsoft technologies. It is based on GPT-4o from OpenAI, a partnership that Microsoft invested over $13 billion into. The product launched in 2023 amid loud promises—"AI everywhere" became the company's mantra for several quarters in a row.

The Microsoft CEO personally called Copilot "the most significant change in Windows in a decade." Reality turned out more restrained. Most users never learned to use Copilot regularly in everyday tasks.

Features embedded in a specific workflow—"Rewrite" in Word or "Summarize" in Teams—take hold. But separate buttons in Photo Viewer or Notepad look like advertising banners inside the operating system. In parallel, regulatory pressure continues.

In Europe, Microsoft faces questions about the privacy of Recall—the "photographic memory" feature of Windows that takes screenshots every few seconds. The feature has been delayed several times, renamed, and ultimately made optional. Copilot+ PC as a hardware platform also did not produce the revolution that advertising promised.

Rollback of entry points is not a rejection of AI strategy. Microsoft continues to bet on monetization through Copilot Pro ($20 per month) and Copilot for Microsoft 365 ($30 per user per month for corporate clients). But the company, apparently, has decided: pushing AI through the interface is counterproductive.

Better to remove friction and wait for users to come to the product themselves. This is a lesson that all platform companies learn with pain—Google, Apple, now Microsoft. Less Copilot in the interface—more Copilot where it actually works.