Microsoft drops group chats and deep research from free Copilot
Reviewed by Helen Jones
Microsoft is folding the consumer Copilot app into the same product used for personal, work, and school accounts. From 18 August 2026, Group Chat threads, messages, and images are not carried forward, and podcasts stop. Deep Research in the free consumer app also starts retiring on that date. Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers can still run detailed reports with Researcher. Chats and files stay split by account type even though the app looks the same. Some features may vanish for a while as accounts update in waves, including Windows and Mac desktop apps from mid-September 2026. Anyone who needed Group Chat or podcast material had to save it before their account switched. Consumer Deep Research is not replaced in the free app.
Until this quarter, many people treated free Copilot as a shared scratchpad: a group thread, a podcast recap, or a long research run that could be reopened later. That habit mixed personal chats with work context and made one-off outputs look like a team process. The new app is one shell with three locked rooms. Collaboration history in Group Chat is gone, free Deep Research is gone, and only paid Researcher keeps the long-form report path. Repeatable work now has to live in a briefing, a Project, or a custom GPT you control, not in a consumer thread Microsoft will not migrate.
Analysis
Treat this as a trap to avoid, not a reason to buy every Microsoft add-on. Open Copilot on each account you use, list any Group Chat, podcast, or Deep Research output still feeding a recurring task, and move the keepers into a short workflow blueprint with inputs, a review step, and a rule that work data stays on the work account.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Microsoft drops group chats and deep research from free Copilot", Collab365 Spaces. 2 sources referenced.