With 2026 being the year Microsoft reduced their Copilot footprint, combined with the complete avoidance of the Copilot+ PC branding during the initial announcement of the Surface Laptop Ultra on June 1, and further dodging during the launch of the Snapdragon X2 Plus-powered Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch last month, it was fair to assume that the Copilot+ PC branding was essentially dead.
However, when Pavan Davuluri went on stage at the October 7 Windows and Surface event, the Windows boss surprisingly mentioned the Copilot+ PC brand and backed it with huge numbers.
“Today, over 40% of the laptops being built for business are Copilot+ PCs”, said Davuluri, adding that they’re “improving customers’ experiences across search, imaging, and video calls.”
Minutes later, the Surface Laptop Ultra was launched starting at $2599.99 and once again skipped the Copilot+ PC label.
However, instead of retiring the category, as many anticipated, Microsoft gave Copilot+ PCs a new job in “Hybrid Intelligence,” where Copilot splits AI work between local models on your PC and the cloud.
After months of avoiding the name, Microsoft is doubling down, and I think hybrid intelligence is worth it. Hear me out…
Copilot+ PCs are getting the capability for hybrid intelligence
Microsoft introduced Copilot+ PCs in May 2024 with an NPU capable of at least 40 TOPS, so AI could run on the laptop without a trip to the cloud. To be fair, the NPU has had plenty to do since then. It powers semantic Windows Search, live caption translations, Windows Studio Effects, Recall, Click to Do, and the agent in Settings, which runs Microsoft’s Mu language model.
The hardware was good, but Microsoft didn’t give ordinary buyers a compelling enough feature to go looking for a Copilot+ PC.
But now, Davuluri confirmed that Copilot+ PC’s are getting all-new features: “Today, we’re announcing that on Copilot+ PCs, Copilot will get supercharged with Windows hybrid intelligence, providing three key local capabilities.
- Local context lets Copilot understand relevant content like files and recent activity on your PC, to help add local context to your workflow.
- Local actions allow Copilot to take action on your behalf, such as moving files or changing a setting, coding, and agentic workflows, all with your permission.
- Local models give Copilot access to AI models running on your PC, and combine local and cloud compute, depending on the task, to reduce your token usage.
The new Windows Blog about hybrid intelligence even has a dedicated section for “Copilot+ PCs, with hybrid intelligence” that talks about the benefits of the platform, like “fast performance, great battery life, and built-in AI features”, while also promising more capabilities powered by the new Copilot and hybrid intelligence.
This is more than enough reason to believe that the branding is not going away anytime soon!
However, there’s a big caveat. Microsoft also says, “Availability and timing may vary by device, market, and silicon platform,” so before you stop thinking about the token usage on your Copilot+ PC, the capabilities that it may receive with hybrid intelligence may vary depending on your processor variant or SKU. Not all Copilot+ PCs are the same!
But if you’re wondering what the actual capability is like, Copilot EVP Jacob Andreou showed off a pre-recorded demo of Hybrid Intelligence on stage:
When asked, Copilot’s Autopilot was able to find tax documents scattered across Downloads and Documents, then organize and rename them with local models, while also zipping them and drafting an email to send to Andreou’s accountant. “My tax details are not going to the cloud,” is a very compelling reason to use on-device AI.
Davuluri says customers keep asking him, “how do I get the most of my token budgets without giving up frontier capability?” Windows answers with intelligent routing, running AI locally “where it makes sense” and reaching to the cloud “when it needs to.” Every task a local model picks up is one less request billed to the cloud, so your tokens get more mileage.
The Copilot+ PC story went badly after Microsoft launched it in 2024
The first Copilot+ PCs used Snapdragon X chips, and Recall was the star of the show, with hardware requirements of a 40 TOPS NPU and 16GB of RAM.
After security researchers tore into Recall’s screenshot database, Microsoft pulled it from a Windows 11 24H2 build in June 2024. By August, it had nothing to share, and Recall only reached Copilot+ PCs in April 2025.
Snapdragon models also had driver and anti-cheat limitations, and X fact-checked Microsoft’s claim about “fastest” Windows PCs around the time Intel and AMD chips joined the category. By December 2024, even the Copilot key had lost its purpose.
In 2026, the pullback became obvious. Surface Laptop Ultra was revealed in June without Copilot+ branding, and Windows 11’s local language model APIs came to RTX 30-series GPUs with 6GB of VRAM.
Microsoft also admitted the Copilot key caused “disruption to productivity and accessibility workflows” and by September, Insiders could map it to the context menu key.
Microsoft is now giving Copilot+ PCs a reason to exist again
Davuluri called Copilot+ PCs “your PC for everyday AI,” shipping in “tens of millions of PCs a year,” with “over 2 trillion inferences per month running locally” across search, imaging, and video calls.
The old pitch was a handful of exclusive AI features. The new one is a PC where Copilot decides whether a task runs on your device or in the cloud, and Davuluri said “the hybrid intelligence experiences you just saw from Jacob will take advantage of local AI on Copilot+ PCs.”
Of course, if you currently have a Copilot+ PC, it can’t do any of this yet. Microsoft says these features are coming “over the next couple of months” to the new Copilot app, which Satya Nadella calls “a new OS for work.”
For two years, Copilot+ PC meant a list of NPU features most users didn’t care about. If Hybrid Intelligence works the way Microsoft showed it on stage, the badge might finally tell you whether your PC can keep some of Copilot’s work off the cloud.
