Windows 11 laptops will have a Copilot key, because of course they will

Microsoft and its partners are betting hard on 2024 being the year of the AI PC, and if laptop names like the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo didn't make that obvious, there's a bit more coming. Microsoft today announced that Windows 11 laptops launching in 2024 will come with a new key on their keyboards — the Copilot key.

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft says that in the coming days, you'll be seeing laptops coming from its partners featuring a new dedicated key for accessing Copilot, the AI assistant that's now built into Windows 11. Previously, Copilot could be accessed by clicking the icon on the taskbar, or by pressing the Windows key and C on your keyboard, but this should make it even easier to access the assistant.

This seems to be a permanent change to the keyboard layout you'd expect, or at least that's the goal, according to Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, who said: "The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades. We believe it will empower people to participate in the AI transformation more easily. The Copilot key joins the Windows key as a core part of the PC keyboard and when pressed, the new key will invoke the Copilot in Windows experience to make it seamless to engage Copilot in your day to day".

Microsoft is no stranger to adding keys to some of its own keyboards, and it's a practice keyboard manufacturers often engage in for proprietary features. For example, some Surface keyboard models have had an emoji key, or an Office key, for instance. But to see Microsoft bring this new key to its partners' laptops is certainly interesting, and it shows the company is very serious about making AI the big focus of everyone's computing experience.

Microsoft's Copilot push has been going pretty hard for the past year or so, ever since the platform debuted as Bing Chat. In addition to Windows 11, the feature is also available (in more limited form) on Windows 10, and there's Copilot for Microsoft 365, too. Microsoft has also kept upgrading the tool with the latest version of the GPT language model, DALL-E 3 for image generation, and plug-in support for even more capabilities. Hardware partners are also making AI a major focus, with AMD's Ryzen 8000 laptop processors doubling down on Ryzen AI (with barely any other changes), and Intel integrating its first-ever NPU with the Core Ultra series of processors. You can expect the best laptops of the year to focus heavily on AI, and we'll probably see more and more AI features come to all kinds of software, too.