“It’s really about bringing the value of AI and specifically Copilot to Windows 10,” says Aaron Woodman, vice president of Windows marketing.
Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro users are getting Copilot, the AI assistant that was previously only available in Windows 11, the company announced Thursday during its annual Microsoft Ignite event. Office 2021 Professional Plus Key
“The general orientation right now inside the company is how do we accelerate the value of AI and bring it to as many customers as humanly possible, for their benefit, but also our selfish benefit as we kind of learn and better understand where we can help customers along the way,” said Aaron Woodman, vice president of Windows marketing.
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Microsoft wants more Copilot users, both to bring the functionality of the AI-driven bolt-on product for Windows to more customers, but also to collect more information about how to use AI at work, he said.
Woodman said the conversations within Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft are centered around the belief that AI can help serve customers “en masse” and that Microsoft can be a leader in doing that. The version of Copilot that is now coming to the broad Windows 10 base holds on to much of the performance that users experience within Windows 11, Woodman said.
“There are going to be some functional differences and certain skills or actions that you can take in Windows 11 that do not exist in Windows 10,” he said. The bare minimum system requirements are four gigabytes of RAM and the ability to push out graphics at 720 dpi, or greater.
“We’re going to initially support this only with Windows 10 Home and Pro SKUs, with a plan to share more information on what this means for our managed commercial and enterprise customers soon,” Woodman said, adding that it won’t yet be available for “managed SKUs.”
The end of support for Windows 10 remains Oct. 14, 2025.
Another change will give Windows 10 users a toggle switch that lets them turn on notications for updates and as soon as the update is available, rather than hunting for updates, Woodman said.
Microsoft said in an April blog post that there would be no more updates to Windows 10, however Woodman said these changes do not modify this version of Windows so much as to make it more usable for Copilot customers.
“It’s really about bringing the value of AI and specifically Copilot to Windows 10,” Woodman said.
On Thursday, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella called this moment the “age of Copilots” and hopes the products introduced at this show will make Microsoft a leader in artificial intelligence from the infrastructure layer to data and applications.
Copilots—Microsoft’s name for its generative AI tools that can generate text, code and other content—are the new user interface “that helps us gain access to the world’s knowledge and your organization’s knowledge,”
“Microsoft copilot is that one experience that runs across all our surfaces, understanding your context on the web, on your device and when you’re at work, bringing the right skills to you when you need them,” Nadella said. “Just like, say, today you boot up an operating system to access applications or a browser to navigate to a website, you can invoke a copilot to do all these activities and more—to shop, to code, to analyze, to learn, to create. We want the copilot to be everywhere you are.”
Office 2021 Professional Plus Key O’Ryan Johnson is a veteran news reporter. He covers the data center beat for CRN and hopes to hear from channel partners about how he can improve his coverage and write the stories they want to read. He can be reached at ojohnson@thechannelcompany.com..