Copilot's merge retires four features on August 18

The consolidation Nadella described last week is now shipping, and it comes with a deletion date. Microsoft has started merging the consumer Copilot app into Microsoft 365 Copilot under one name, and on August 18 four features go away. If anyone on your team parked work inside Copilot Group Chats, that content does not survive the migration.

What actually happened

Per Microsoft's support documentation and reporting from GeekWire, migration started this week with Windows Insiders, broadens next week, hits mobile and web mid-August, and reaches the Windows and Mac apps in mid-September. The commercial web address moves from m365.cloud.microsoft to copilot.cloud.microsoft, with redirects from late August.

Retired for consumers on August 18:

• Group Chats — threads, messages, and images created inside them are not carried forward. Microsoft's guidance is to copy what you want into a document and download the images yourself.
• Podcasts — no create, no access after the date.
• Deep Research — replaced by Researcher, available only to Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers.
• Copilot Labs — the experimental surface shuts down.

Mico, the animated voice-mode character, retires as well. Chat history, images, and generated content migrate; files land in OneDrive, and more storage there needs a paid plan. For commercial tenants, GeekWire reports the change is mostly cosmetic — security, compliance, and admin controls hold, and work and personal data stay separated.

Why it matters for your business

The tenant-level story is boring, which is the good news. The people-level story is not. Small teams use the free consumer app constantly, and Group Chats is exactly where an ad-hoc project thread ends up. Five days from now that thread is gone, with no export button.

Do this today: message the team, name the four features, and tell anyone using them to pull their content out manually. It takes ten minutes and there is no undo.

Then take the wider lesson. A free feature inside a vendor's app is not storage. It has no export, no retention policy you control, and a deprecation date the vendor picks. The same consolidation logic that produced one Copilot app will keep pruning features that didn't land. Anything you'd be upset to lose belongs somewhere you can back up — a repo, a database, a file store you own. We build systems that way on purpose: the artifacts stay yours when the product roadmap moves.

Sources: Microsoft Support — Updates to Copilot and the Microsoft Copilot app, GeekWire.