Microsoft Is Calling Too Many Things 'Copilot,' Watchdog Says

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has a long history of being criticized for coming up with clunky product names, and for changing them so often it's hard for customers to keep up. The company's own employees once joked in a viral video that the iPod would have been called the 'Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription' had it been created by Microsoft. The latest gripe among some employees and customers: The company's tendency to slap 'Copilot' on everything AI.

'There is a delusion on our marketing side where literally everything has been renamed to have Copilot it in,' one employee told Business Insider late last year. 'Everything is Copilot. Nothing else matters. They want a Copilot tie-in for everything.' Now, an advertising watchdog is weighing in. The Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division reviewed Microsoft's advertising for its Copilot AI tools. NAD called out Microsoft's 'universal use of the product description as 'Copilot'' and said 'consumers would not necessarily understand the difference,' according to a recent report from the watchdog.

'Microsoft is using 'Copilot' across all Microsoft Office applications and Business Chat, despite differences in functionality and the manual steps that are required for Business Chat to produce the same results as Copilot in a specific Microsoft Office app,' NAD further explained in an email to BI. NAD did not mention any specific recommendations on product names. But it did say Microsoft should modify claims that Copilot works 'seamlessly across all your data' because all of the company's tools with the Copilot moniker don't work together continuously in a way consumers might expect.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.