Microsoft’s Copilot app has a new icon, and it’s causing problems

By Judy Sanhz Published January 21, 2025

Bad news if you have a PC with a low resolution since Microsoft’s new Copilot app icon is almost impossible to decipher on them, according to Windows Central. Microsoft’s new logo now includes a bit of text embedded in the icon, which, depending on the resolution of your screen, might be impossible to read.

Windows Central

The poor design has not gone unnoticed online. Users can barely read the icon on their screens when they pin it to the Taskbar, and the lower pixel density makes it even harder to read the icon’s text. If you have a Surface Laptop Go, which has a very low resolution display, there is a good chance you had no idea it said “M365.” When you first saw it, you may have confused it with text such as MJEG, M366, or M355.

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Keep in mind that Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot are different services. For example, on Microsoft 365 Copilot, you can use apps such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and more. The Copilot app is a chat service, so it doesn’t make sense that the icons are almost identical, right? I understand that Microsoft wants to encourage users to use Copilot, but confusing them with the same design is not the way to go.

However, the Microsoft Copilot design fiasco doesn’t affect how the apps work, but it could make Microsoft look like they didn’t dedicate enough time to it. Microsoft has not commented on the design failure yet, but hopefully, it will at least try to make the two app icons look somewhat different. Time will tell if you will see a new design for the app icon the next time you turn on your computer.

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Computing Writer

Judy Sanhz is a Digital Trends computing writer covering all computing news. Loves all operating systems and devices.

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A screenshot of the Windows 11 Microsoft Account setup page

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Microsoft 365 Copilot gets an AI Researcher that everyone will love

Researcher agent in action inside Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

Microsoft is late to the party, but it is finally bringing a deep research tool of its own to the Microsoft 365 Copilot platform across the web, mobile, and desktop. Unlike competitors such as Google Gemini, Perplexity, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, all of which use the Deep Research name, Microsoft is going with the Researcher agent branding.
The overarching idea, however, isn’t too different. You tell the Copilot AI to come up with thoroughly researched material on a certain topic or create an action plan, and it will oblige by producing a detailed document that would otherwise take hours of human research and compilation. It’s all about performing complex, multi-step research on your behalf as an autonomous AI agent.
Just to avoid any confusion early on, Microsoft 365 Copilot is essentially the rebranded version of the erstwhile Microsoft 365 (Office) app. It is different from the standalone Copilot app, which is more like a general purpose AI chatbot application.
Researcher: A reasoning agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot
How Researcher agent works?
Underneath the Researcher agent, however, is OpenAI’s Deep Research model. But this is not a simple rip-off. Instead, the feature’s implementation in Microsoft 365 Copilot runs far deeper than the competition. That’s primarily because it can look at your own material, or a business’ internal data, as well.
Instead of pulling information solely from the internet, the Researcher agent can also take a look at internal documents such as emails, chats, internal meeting logs, calendars, transcripts, and shared documents. It can also reference data from external sources such as Salesforce, as well as other custom agents that are in use at a company.
“Researcher’s intelligence to reason and connect the dots leads to magical moments,” claims Microsoft. Researcher agent can be configured by users to reference data from the web, local files, meeting recordings, emails, chats, and sales agent, on an individual basis — all of them, or just a select few.

Why it stands out?

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