Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI PC plan fizzled, but it still served a purpose

Microsoft’s Copilot+ initiative launched last year with a clear goal: To produce capable laptops for people eagerly anticipating AI-powered features. Read that sentence again, and it’s glaringly obvious that Microsoft’s plan was flawed from the start. Most consumers aren’t nearly as hyped for AI features as the companies eager to foist artificial intelligence upon us. And those features aren’t exactly compelling, either. Microsoft’s Recall — which snaps screenshots of your PC to create a database of everything you’ve done– was dogged by privacy concerns from the start. And to be honest, I haven’t found its ability to remember the files and websites I’ve opened to be that useful.

Without any sort of killer AI app, most consumers weren’t going to pay a premium for Copilot+ systems either. Not in this precarious economy, anyway. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to see sales of Copilot+ systems going practically nowhere over the last year. In the third quarter of 2024, they accounted for less than 10 percent of systems shipped, according to data from Mercury Research (via Tom’s Hardware). The research firm IDC (via PCWorld) also found that Copilot+ systems made up just 2.3 percent of Windows machines sold in the first quarter of 2025 (and a mere 1.9 percent of the entire PC market).

Instead of continuing to promote Copilot+, Microsoft now wants to “make every Windows 11 computer an AI PC”. The new “Hey Copilot” voice commands and Copilot Vision, a feature that lets the AI assistant see what’s on your screen, are both cloud-powered. That means you won’t need the beefy 40 TOPS neural processing units (NPU) found on Copilot+ systems to use them. Microsoft spent the past few years touting NPUs as the gateway to useful AI features, like Recall and Windows Studio webcam effects, but only one of its new AI capabilities actually requires an NPU. (And even that is just a slight update to Click to Do, allowing you to send Zoom invitations by right-clicking on e-mail addresses.)

It’s easy to view the whole Copilot+ initiative as a cynical way to ramp up AI hype and push people towards expensive new laptops, especially as the October 14 Windows 10 end of support date loomed. But it also led to some genuinely useful changes: Microsoft made 16GB of RAM a standard for Copilot+ systems, along with 256GB of storage and the aforementioned 40 TOPS NPUs. The launch of Copilot was also the kick in the pants Microsoft needed to revamp Windows for mobile Arm processors. I never thought I’d love a Surface with a Snapdragon chip, but the improved Arm support on the Surface Pro and this year’s smaller model finally won me over.

I wouldn’t call the Copilot+ program a huge swing, but it’s still the sort of industry-wide cat herding that’s rare to see in the PC space. Microsoft couldn’t just snap its fingers and shift all PCs to efficient mobile chips with powerful NPUs, like Apple did with its own jump to M-series chips years ago. Microsoft had to wait for new NPU-equipped hardware from Qualcomm (and eventually Intel and AMD). It had to finally fix the Windows on Arm problem. And it also had to double-down on AI features that felt truly transformative. It’s just a shame that consumers didn’t seem to care.

Microsoft said that Copilot+ systems accounted for 15 percent of premium PCs sold during last year’s holiday season, but the company hasn’t released any new sales figures since then. “This is the fastest adoption I’ve seen of a new category of hardware, and we’ve done it faster than the normal generational shift of silicon,” James Howell, Microsoft’s VP of Windows marketing, said in a conversation with Engadget. “Copilot+ PCs continue to be a transition that we are pushing for and prioritizing. But I can’t give you the exact numbers beyond that… Just for the last two or three months, we’ve been doing pretty well with year-on-year growth in the Windows business.”

While Microsoft ultimately doesn’t have much to show for the Copilot+ initiative, the steady progression of hardware will lead to AI PCs dominating over the next five years. The research firm Omdia predicts that AI PCs will account for 55 percent of computers shipped in all of 2026, up from 42.5 percent of systems in Q3 2025. By 2029, Omdia predicts AI PCs will make up 75 percent of all systems shipped, giving Windows 80 percent of the AI PC market.

“It’s important to note that this steep adoption curve [for AI PCs] is driven more by the product roadmaps of the PC market, rather than consumers and businesses seeking PCs specifically for AI,” according to Omdia research analyst Kieren Jessop. “For businesses, and consumers especially, AI-capable PC adoption is more a function of a customer going to purchase a device and that device just so happens to have an NPU.”

Microsoft was basically right: AI PCs are the future. But it turns out the AI features people actually want to use — like ChatGPT, Sora and Microsoft’s own Copilot — are mostly powered by the cloud, making onboard NPUs superfluous. That won’t be true forever. There are tangible security, speed and convenience benefits for onboard AI processing, like transcribing sensitive audio instead of sending it to the cloud. But for now, those AI workloads are relatively niche, and they’re not enough to make the Copilot+ a true success by any measure.