Microsoft Pushes Copilot as ‘OS for Work’ as Office and Teams Chief Roslansky Exits

At an invite-only event for leaders from key enterprise customers last week, Nadella pitched the redesigned Copilot as a shift comparable to the PC spreadsheet era. “How did a multinational company do a forecast in 1981? You had interoffice memos and faxes and all of these artifacts that then just disappeared and you suddenly had an Excel spreadsheet in an email,” Nadella said, according to The Verge. “We are the architects of a new frontier of work, using these new tools and capabilities.”

Microsoft has spent the past several months merging its consumer and enterprise Copilot apps into a single interface, aiming to make Copilot as influential as Office once was, The Verge reported. The new app looks more like the commercial version, with separate tabs for chat, coding and the new Autopilot AI agent. It marks a departure from the consumer Copilot design launched two years ago by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, which was heavily influenced by Inflection AI’s Pi assistant after Microsoft hired many Inflection staff members.

Jacob Andreou, Microsoft’s Copilot chief, said at the customer-only event that consumer expectations are raising the bar for workplace software. “The bar for enterprise software is higher than it has ever been before,” Andreou said. “The expectations we have of the tools we adopt at work are set by the things we use after hours and at the weekends at home. What this means is that consumer UX and care needs to make its way into the workplace.” Nadella appointed Andreou in March as the single boss of Copilot across commercial and consumer, reporting directly to the CEO, with responsibility for design, engineering and growth.

The redesign has not been smooth, according to The Verge, which reported tensions between Andreou’s team and Charles Lamanna’s Copilot, Agents, and Platform group. Lamanna’s team built Microsoft Scout, an always-on personal agent announced at Build in June as a desktop preview. Less than six months later, the app has been placed in maintenance mode while Microsoft focuses on the cloud version, rebranded as Autopilot, the report said.

The Verge reported that the rebrand was driven in part by legal concerns over the Scout name, because Yahoo uses “Yahoo Scout” branding for its own AI features. Microsoft had even considered using Mico, the Clippy-like character from consumer Copilot, to replace Scout, but Nadella favored Autopilot to present the agent in a more enterprise-friendly way rather than as a “bouncing blob,” according to the report. The caution comes as rogue AI agents have been hacking into businesses. Nadella said last week that Copilot’s design goals are about organizations maintaining control in an age of AI. “[It’s] about organizations having control of their firms in an age of AI, where AI by definition is a learning machine,” he said. “It can’t be about leaking the core of what your firm is about.”

Andreou also acknowledged the difficulty of bringing AI agents into enterprises. “They have been almost impossible to bring into the enterprise,” he said, because agents need autonomy and flexibility that companies resist. “It is their superpower, and it’s the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin.” Microsoft says its “OS for work” solves that problem for businesses, while leaving room for competitors such as Meta and OpenAI to build an “OS for life,” The Verge reported. With 1.2 billion people using ChatGPT weekly, Microsoft is leaning on its business-focused strengths rather than competing directly with consumer-friendly agents. Andreou said the company is not giving up on consumers, pointing to the nearly 90 million people who pay for Microsoft 365 out of their own pocket.

Roslansky’s departure adds to a broader executive reshuffle. CNBC reported that Nadella announced in a Thursday memo that Roslansky will leave at the end of 2026. “Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position,” Nadella wrote. Roslansky joined LinkedIn as product chief in 2009, when it was still private, after management roles at Yahoo and Glam Media. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016, and Roslansky replaced Jeff Weiner as CEO in 2020. During his tenure, LinkedIn’s membership expanded from 700 million to 1.3 billion, and in July Microsoft disclosed that LinkedIn revenue growth for the June fiscal year accelerated to 11% from less than 9% a year earlier.

Earlier this year, Nadella named Roslansky and two other executives to lead Microsoft 365 applications and the Copilot AI platform, and Dan Shapero, LinkedIn’s chief operating officer, became LinkedIn CEO. Roslansky also took control of Microsoft Teams this year, The Verge reported. His exit follows other senior departures: gaming head Phil Spencer and Office leader Rajesh Jha both left this year, and Charlie Bell, the company’s head of security, became an individual contributor, according to CNBC. Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder, also announced plans to leave Microsoft’s board.

Nadella credited Roslansky’s team with work on the unified Copilot app. “With Copilot, we are executing rapidly against our vision to build a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task, with Office fully embedded in Copilot and vice versa,” Nadella wrote. “Over the past year, Ryan’s team has done critical work bringing together the product, engineering, and design foundations that have made this next phase possible.” Roslansky’s departure comes about a month after he called fully AI-generated documents “a doom loop” for workers. “If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with a very expensive way to avoid writing and reading in an ocean of sameness, genericness,” he wrote on LinkedIn, according to The Verge.

In his own memo, Roslansky said the decision was hard and that he was not willing to move to Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters full time. “I know what it would take for me to lead the next phase of this work well: being in Redmond full time, every day,” he wrote. “But my life and my family’s life are here in the Bay Area.” He described joining LinkedIn as Weiner’s first hire in 2009 and said he spent nearly 18 years working on helping people find opportunity. “Last year, Satya asked me to help build the future of M365,” he wrote. “Once again, the old rules didn’t apply. AI was rapidly changing how professionals work, and the world’s largest productivity suite needed to lead the way.”

Microsoft is moving the teams behind Office and Microsoft Teams to Charles Lamanna as part of the Copilot, Agents, and Platform organization, The Verge reported. It is the second major reshuffling of the Office teams after Rajesh Jha retired earlier this year. Microsoft’s chief design officer, Jon Friedman, is also moving to report to Andreou. Dan Shapero will continue as LinkedIn CEO and report directly to Nadella.

Editor's Summary

Microsoft is positioning Copilot as an enterprise “OS for work,” combining coding and agent capabilities with Office integration while rebranding its Scout agent as Autopilot. The strategy is unfolding alongside a leadership shuffle in which Ryan Roslansky, the former LinkedIn CEO who later headed Office and Teams, will leave at the end of 2026. Microsoft is moving Office and Teams under Charles Lamanna and shifting its chief design officer to report to Copilot chief Jacob Andreou.