Microsoft is jumping into the AI browser wars with a bet that making its Edge browser your new personal assistant will help it compete with Google Chrome, as well as upstart projects from OpenAI and Perplexity.
Instead of creating an entirely new browser, the company revamped its Edge web browser with “Copilot Mode,” which lets AI do the hard tasks for you. While you sit back and watch, Microsoft’s Copilot tool can control your tabs, visit websites, and even book restaurant reservations in what Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman calls a “magical experience.”
“It’s almost like having a little angel on your shoulder doing the boring hard work of reading reviews, doing price comparisons, synthesizing research, but instead of it happening away from you, you can actually see it in real time unfolding before your eyes,” Suleyman told The Verge.
Copilot will be able to click on buttons, do research, and “read” reviews based on a user’s command, Suleyman explained. Instead of a ChatGPT-style summary where you get the information you ask for in a separate window, Copilot Mode is more like handing over command of your browser to a personal assistant. Yet, if the user wants to step in at any time they can, he said, and the AI features aren’t mandatory.
“You’ll always be in control, and I think the transparency creates trust,” said Suleyman.
Microsoft’s approach to AI web browsing differs from that of the leading browser, Google’s Chrome. Google in June released “AI Mode” in Chrome, which lets users ask more complex and multi-part questions compared to normal search, but the results are still isolated on a separate summary tab. Suleyman believes Microsoft’s advances in getting AI to browse for you give it a leg up.
“We’ve been very deliberate and careful, and that’s going to pay dividends because we have a whole set of features that no one else on the market has today,” Suleyman said. “I think we’re actually way ahead.”
Google did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
However, Microsoft faces an uphill battle to take on Chrome’s 69% market share. The Edge browser currently stands at third place globally, with 5% market share. Competition is also heating up.
AI startup Perplexity (which bid $34.5 billion to try to buy Chrome earlier this year) launched its AI web browser Comet in July, and OpenAI is reportedly close to releasing its own web browser. Google, for its part, appears to be following Edge by “developing more advanced agentic capabilities for Gemini in Chrome that can perform multi-step tasks for you from start to finish, like ordering groceries,” it said in a blog post last week.
Despite the odds, Suleyman is optimistic, and noted people will want to use an AI browser because it will make their lives easier.
“In a few years’ time it will be doing all the work for you, and you’ll be passively overseeing it, steering it, giving feedback,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a magical experience and a lot of people will choose to move to that.”
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