Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad is a sign of the company’s shifting AI priorities

• Microsoft posted its Super Bowl ad for Copilot, its AI assistant, with no mention of the new Bing. 
• It’s a sign that Microsoft is shifting its AI priorities towards its ChatGPT rival. 
• Despite low usage, Microsoft doesn’t see its AI search tool as a failure, an exec told The Verge. 

Microsoft’s appears to be focusing its artificial intelligence efforts more on its AI companion Copilot over its revamped Bing search engine — and the tech giant’s latest Super Bowl ad may be a sign of the company’s changing priorities.

On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed its Super Bowl ad for Copilot’s standalone smartphone app that can answer user queries akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The one-minute promo video shows different people using Copilot to generate storyboard images for a script, write code for a 3-D game, and create a quiz on organic chemistry.

But viewers who’ve been following Microsoft’s AI efforts may be wondering: what about Bing chat, the AI-powered search engine that the company launched months before Copilot?

“We really got behind a single brand called Copilot, so we cleaned up all these other things and we renamed Bing Chat,” Yusuf Mehdi, the executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer of Microsoft, told The Verge in an interview regarding the Super Bowl ad. “So we have one brand, one experience.”

The pivot to Copilot from Bing chat may be, in part, because the AI-powered search engine — which some tech leaders saw as a potential threat to Google search — just didn’t catch on with users.

Between February 2023 and January 2024, Google possessed nearly 91% of the worldwide market share for search, according to data from Statcounter. Bing, which added AI capabilities to its search engine last February, had around only 3% of the search market within that same time frame.

Even though Google continues to dominate online search, the Microsoft exec doesn’t see the new Bing as a total flop. “We’ve seen [Bing] share grow,” says Mehdi.

Mehdi added that while Bing hasn’t “completely reshaped the search landscape,” the launch still mattered to Microsoft.

“Even a few points of share growth is significant for Microsoft and for customers to bring more competition,” he says.

Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment before publication.

Microsoft’s shift from Bing to Copilot comes as the tech company seeks to integrate Copilot across its product lines.

Before existing as a standalone app, the AI chatbot was first introduced across its suite of Office apps like PowerPoint, Word, and Excel to help boost productivity.

Later, Microsoft issued a software update to Windows 10 and Windows 11 computers that allowed users easy access to Copilot by holding down the Windows and the C key simultaneously.

Now, Microsoft has plans to add a new Copilot button to Windows 11 PC keyboards, which the company says will be available starting in late February.