Microsoft has initiated a confusing rebranding of its flagship Office software, officially renaming the productivity hub the “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”. This change creates a recursive naming scheme where the application used to launch tools like Word and PowerPoint shares the exact same name as the AI chatbot assistant embedded within those very programs. Some online are speculating the move to be a strategic effort to inflate AI usage statistics by making the AI identity inseparable from the core software suite.
The decision has drawn criticism (and confusion) for abandoning the massively recognizable “Office” brand, which generated over $30 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone. The Verge points out that this renaming is not exactly new and it doesn’t rebrand Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot. At least not yet.
