Microsoft will let Copilot act on local files on Windows PCs
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Copilot will also use AI models running on the PC alongside cloud models to help customers reduce costs and gain more control over their data.
Microsoft will let Copilot act on local files on Windows PCs
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Copilot will also use AI models running on the PC alongside cloud models to help customers reduce costs and gain more control over their data.
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Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft is giving Copilot greater control over Windows PCs, allowing the AI assistant to organize and make changes to local files, and run certain tasks using on-device AI models.
The changes were announced at Microsoft’s Hybrid Intelligence event, where it outlined plans to combine local and cloud AI processing to help customers reduce AI costs and retain more control over data.
Three new Copilot capabilities will be available to Copilot+ PC users “in the coming months,” Microsoft said.
One is the ability for Copilot to access local files and recent user activity, providing additional context for the AI assistant’s outputs.
Copilot will also be able to perform actions on a device, such as moving files and changing settings.
“It has the same level of the ability to control and change things that I do as a user, but always with permission,” said Jacob Andreou, Microsoft EVP, Copilot, during the event.
The capability sounds similar to Copilot Actions, an “experimental” feature that Microsoft announced last year in preview for Windows Insiders at the time.
Finally, there will be an option to run Copilot on local AI models for certain tasks, only accessing cloud servers “when needed,” Microsoft said.
“Copilot will still use the cloud for the hardest tasks,” said Andreou, “but for times when cost or privacy matter more, it can delegate down to local models that run directly on your computer.”
Microsoft’s hybrid model reflects market demand, noted Biswajeet Mahapatra, principal analyst at Forrester. “The demand we see is not for AI that runs exclusively on-device, but for AI that can intelligently decide which workloads should run locally and which belong in the cloud,” Mahapatra said. “Enterprises increasingly want both options available.”
In a demo, Andreou also showed how the ability to access and interact with local files will increase the usefulness of Autopilot (formerly called Scout), the long-running Copilot agent that can be set to work continuously in the background. (Autopilot is currently in private preview.) Autopilot can also run on locally hosted models, he added, helping reduce costs and avoid sending private data to the cloud.
Microsoft also announced more powerful hardware — including the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box — and more efficient AI models designed to run on devices.
“Most companies are still getting their heads around AI, token usage, which models to use, and where to run them,” said Tom Mainelli, group vice president, Device & Consumer Research, at IDC. “As these companies get more savvy and look to scale AI to more employees, the need to run AI locally — including Microsoft Copilot — will increase.”
Current business laptops have some local AI capabilities and features, said Mainelli, but still largely rely on Copilot running in the cloud. This could change once more advanced hardware is broadly available, he said.
“As more systems ship with the right combination of CPU, GPU, NPU, and memory, and as local models continue to improve, I expect more AI jobs to run on the device,” said Mainelli.
For now, the installed base of enterprise PCs “remains highly mixed,” said Mahapatra.
“While Microsoft highlighted new AI-capable hardware, and noted that a growing share of business laptops are Copilot+ PCs, most enterprise fleets will take several years to refresh,” he said.
“The immediate opportunity is therefore concentrated among organizations already investing in AI PCs and high-performance devices. Many enterprises will continue to rely primarily on cloud-hosted AI while selectively adopting local AI capabilities as refresh cycles progress.”
Microsoft is also attempting to address security when running agents on-device. This includes the general availability launch of Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC) on Windows 11, which allows organizations to set up policies that define which files and networks agents can access. MXC is supported by a range of agent tools, including OpenAI’s Codex and OpenClaw, with Anthropic Claude Code, Box, Manus, and others to follow.
Added security measures should give business customers more confidence when enabling Copilot to access local files, said Mainelli. “That’s what Microsoft is bringing to the table: a level of security and traceability in these processes that should give companies confidence in using them,” he said. “Microsoft took major steps in telling that story today, and we’ll see how companies respond.”
Enterprises should manage agents on Windows devices “in the same way they approach any automation platform: trust should be based on controls, not on the AI itself,” said Mahapatra.
“Microsoft’s announcement is significant because it acknowledges that agents require a different security model than traditional applications,” he said. “Technologies such as Microsoft Execution Containers are designed to limit what agents can access, identify which agent took an action, and enforce policy-based controls.”
At the same, he warned against granting broad autonomous access to local files without appropriate governance. “Role-based access, read-only assistance, document summarization, search, and workflow support are likely to be adopted more quickly than autonomous file modification or business process execution,” Mahapatra said.
“As agents move from providing recommendations to taking actions, organizations will need stronger approval controls, monitoring, auditing, and human oversight. This is especially important for agents interacting with sensitive data, regulated processes, or systems of record.”
WindowsWindows 11Generative AIArtificial IntelligenceOperating Systems
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