Marie Boran worries that Microsoft is optimising for AI first, and your concentration second
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Image: Microsoft
Remember when Clippy used to burst onto your screen like an overeager colleague who’d had three espressos and discovered self-help? It looks like you’re writing a letter! he’d manically announce. We laughed, we suffered, Microsoft eventually retired him, and now, somehow, they’ve rebuilt the same personality, given it a model, and distributed it across the entire stack.
And yes, I know I’m meant to be grateful. Copilot is here to “help me write”. But I write for a living so it’s the one part of my workflow I’m not looking to outsource to a sidebar that keeps clearing its throat.
In Word, the irritation isn’t that Copilot exists. It’s that it hovers. You’ll be halfway through a sentence – not stuck, just mid-thought – and there it is, nudging, suggesting, implying that what you’re doing would go better if you let the machine take a go. It’s like having someone stand behind you at the keyboard offering to finish your paragraphs. Sometimes I’m not looking for a better sentence; I’m looking for my sentence. When I want help, I’ll ask. When I don’t, I don’t want an assistant that behaves like a default layer of the product.
Clippy’s crime wasn’t incompetence. It was confidence. It materialised mid-flow, announced it knew what you were doing, and offered to ‘help’ in a way that mostly made you want to throw your laptop into the sea. Microsoft eventually turned the thing off by default and, later, removed it.
So it’s hard not to feel déjà vu in 2026, watching Copilot spread across the Microsoft universe like a polite mould. The pitch is always the same: it’ll make you faster, smoother, more productive. And sometimes it does. The problem is the other times it’s less power tool and more ambient presence, wedged into the interface whether you asked for it or not.
This is where the paperclip energy returns: the sense that the assistant is being done to you.
Layers of meaning
Microsoft’s own documentation makes the direction of travel clear. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is set up to be automatically installed on Windows devices that have Microsoft 365 desktop apps and Microsoft has acknowledged it temporarily disabled the auto-install due to a technical issue. BleepingComputer reported earlier plans to auto-install the Copilot app for Microsoft 365 on eligible Windows devices with Microsoft 365 Apps, with regional caveats. You don’t have to be a Copilot cynic to recognise what that feels like: not ‘try this if you want’, but ‘this is the new layer – you can deal with it’.
Then there’s Edge, where Copilot is getting more helpful in ways that are either genuinely useful or mildly horrifying, depending on your relationship with boundaries. The latest features give it access to your open tabs, browsing history, and longer-term memory, which builds it into a more personalised assistant by expanding what it can see. This is the same pattern, just sharper: the assistant becomes more powerful by widening its scope. But it leaves you with a nagging question that never quite goes away: what, exactly, does it have access to right now?
Where Copilot goes wrong is when AI stops being a tool and starts being a default posture of the product. It’s the assistant that pops up at the wrong time or the prompt bar that turns every pause into a sales opportunity. There’s a creeping sense that your software is optimised for Microsoft’s AI strategy first, and your concentration second.
So if we’re going to integrate AI into real workflows, here are three rules Microsoft and others should keep in mind: 1) Assistants should be opt-in in spirit, not just in settings. If your rollout feels compulsory, users will treat it as bloat. 2) Boundaries must be legible. If Copilot can read across tabs or dig through history, the UI should make that very obvious. Finally, 3) Never interrupt flow. Clippy didn’t fail because it lacked features. It failed because it couldn’t tell the difference between being helpful and plain getting in the way.
Copilot doesn’t need to be smarter to avoid becoming the new Clippy. It needs to be quieter, clearer, and easier to ignore. Because the modern version of bursting in shouting “It looks like you’re writing a letter” is “It looks like you’re trying to think, let me do that for you”.