If you woke up to a feed full of people saying Microsoft renamed Office to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot', you were in good company. The story is true — sort of — but the truth is messier and says more about Microsoft's branding habits than it does about a dramatic product overhaul.
So what actually changed?
Microsoft did not rename Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. The confusion comes from the little portal app and a few public-facing signs. The app that lives at Office.com — historically a hub pointing people at the core Office web apps — now greets visitors with a banner reading something like 'The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)'. That copy refers to the small 2019 'Office' hub app, which Microsoft rebranded to the Microsoft 365 app in 2022 and then updated to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in January 2025.
In short: the umbrella hub got the Copilot name. The subscription and the desktop apps remain Microsoft 365 (and the standalone Office 2024 SKU still exists). Microsoft told reporters that Word, Excel and PowerPoint 'remain unchanged' in name and function. That clarification came after posts on Reddit, Hacker News and X sparked a wave of headlines and social panics.
Other signals fed the panic: the official Office X (Twitter) account was locked and redirected people to the @Microsoft365 account, and the Office.com message is oddly blunt about the 'formerly Office' phrasing. Taken together, those nudges make it feel like a retirement notice for 'Office' — even if Microsoft insists the core suite hasn't been renamed.
Why people are so easily confused
There are two answers: history and repetition.
First, Microsoft has a long history of renaming and reshuffling products — Office 365 to Microsoft 365, Lync to Skype to Teams, multiple incarnations of .NET — which trains people to expect big-name shifts. Second, the company has been slapping 'Copilot' on everything: Windows Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Copilot for Security, and dozens more. When one sees Copilot everywhere, it's easy to assume the iconic 'Office' name is next.
Regulatory and industry voices have noticed the problem too. The National Advertising Division has flagged Copilot branding as potentially misleading, and some Microsoft employees have privately grumbled that the marketing team is overenthusiastic about tacking 'Copilot' onto interfaces and channels.
Why this matters beyond a social-media kerfuffle
Names shape expectations. If customers think Office has transformed into a Copilot-first product, they may assume AI features are baked into every corner, or worry about pricing, privacy, and support changes. That confusion has real business consequences: users delay purchases, help desks get swamped, and brand equity erodes. Consider Twitter's shift to 'X' or past corporate missteps — rebrands can cost both recognition and revenue.
Clarity matters especially now, as Microsoft doubles down on AI across its stack. The company is developing new models and tools internally (for example, its own image model) while integrations proliferate; those moves make it easy to conflate product, portal and platform. If you want a sense of where Microsoft's AI push is headed, its in-house MAI-Image-1 work is an instructive piece of the puzzle, showing the depth of the company's recent investments Microsoft’s MAI-Image-1 model.
At the same time, users wrestling with AI in Windows or wanting to quiet intrusive assistant features may want practical clean-up tips for their machines — there are step-by-step guides that explain how to declutter and limit AI-driven noise in Windows 11 how to declutter Windows 11 25H2.
And this isn't happening in a vacuum: competitors are pushing their own productivity-AI tight integrations, too. Google’s work on 'Deep Research' that plugs Gemini into Gmail and Drive shows how big players are racing to fold search and AI into everyday productivity services, which only raises the stakes for clear naming and packaging Gemini Deep Research and Gmail/Drive integration.
A branding experiment that needs boundaries
Microsoft's strategy — put Copilot at the center of as many touchpoints as possible — makes a certain strategic sense. The company wants to own the narrative around AI-enabled productivity. But branding without clarity creates friction. An app banner, a redirected social handle and a year-old rollout suddenly rediscovered by the internet turned this into a controversy.
For customers and IT teams the practical reality is simple: your Office apps aren't suddenly gone under a new name. But for Microsoft the episode is a reminder that naming is product policy: when you fold a theme into dozens of offerings, take care to explain which parts changed and which didn't.
If you're trying to figure out whether anything you use has actually been renamed — or whether AI features are included in your subscription tier — check Microsoft's official product pages or your admin center. The noise will fade; the branding muddle probably won't, unless Microsoft decides to pause and simplify the labels it's been feeding into every corner of its business.