Microsoft chases Google and pushes Copilot Ai on its Edge browser

Satya Nadella's post on X at 7.29 p.m. on 28 July was very clear in its intent: 'Today we are introducing Copilot mode in Edge,' the Microsoft CEO wrote, 'and it is our first step towards reinventing the browser for the age of artificial intelligence.... You can use Copilot to analyse your open tabs, as I do here with articles published by our team in various journals over the past year. And there's much more to come, including built-in actions that allow you to delegate tasks while browsing'.

The summary of this announcement is easy to understand: the Redmond company, with the launch of Copilot Mode for Edge, is integrating AI into its navigation software, and thus the ability to understand and interpret the user's search requests, to predict the user's intentions, and to act autonomously on behalf of the user itself as a true intelligent agent. The road, in short, is the one taken by Google and OpenAI no more than a couple of weeks ago: the browser is (or will be) no longer just a tool for displaying websites, but a navigation companion that monitors our activity, understands our goals, and suggests concrete actions to achieve them.

Thanks to Copilot Mode, which will be available free of charge for a limited period of time on the Windows and Mac versions of Edge, the browser anticipates the user's subsequent actions with respect to clicks, and instead of limiting itself to producing endless web pages to consult and browse through, it puts itself at the service of Internet users like a real assistant, to help us navigate better and to make the whole process smoother and faster, in accordance with the highest standards of security and respect for privacy. Microsoft in this sense ensures that Copilot will only access navigation content when authorised by the user, with clear visual indications to make it transparent when the AI is 'watching' and 'listening' to us. Whenever a new tab is opened in Edge with this mode enabled, a clean, simplified page will appear on the screen with a single input box combining chat, search and assisted navigation. With the user's permission, Copilot can see all the tabs opened to understand the context and nature of what is being explored online and offer relevant help accordingly by exploiting one of its most interesting gifts, namely its predictive ability. The leap forward, as they assure Microsoft, is substantial precisely because the 'copilot' transforms the browser into a tool that helps the user decide what to do online and simplify the browsing experience, it being understood that at any time one can disable it and return to the classic version of the browser by acting on the settings.

Copilot also has the peculiarity of being able to handle even complex tasks for us. It will soon be possible to give the AI permission to access additional information such as history and credentials to take more advanced actions, such as booking appointments or trips or generating and producing documents and content. It will also be possible to talk to Copilot in natural language about what one wants to do, whether it is to locate information on a page or to open a few tabs to compare options between different products or services of interest. In the future, Copilot will also be able to suggest how to resume searches left unfinished, advising on the next steps to take and saving the user the trouble of having to mentally reconstruct the entire route taken. The AI, simply put, will no longer be content to answer questions but will become a full-fledged search assistant within the browser, simultaneously analysing the results obtained and providing appropriate comparative summaries. The path that Microsoft has also signed up to is clear and goes more and more in the direction of agent AI: whether users will actually enjoy the enormous benefits that all the BigTechs have hastened to promise, we will find out very soon.