There’s a little swirly icon sitting in the taskbar of most Windows 11 PCs right now, and a fair few Australians still aren’t sure what it does or why it showed up. That’s Copilot, Microsoft’s built-in AI assistant, and whether you love it or find it mildly annoying, it’s become a permanent fixture on new PCs and most updated ones. We get asked about it constantly from readers who game, readers who just want to write emails, and readers who are convinced their laptop is now “spying” on them. None of those reactions are quite right, so let’s sort out what Copilot in Windows actually is, what it’s genuinely good for, and the full process for shutting it down if you’d rather not have it hanging around.
What Copilot actually is
Copilot is Microsoft’s AI chat assistant, built using the same underlying technology family as OpenAI’s models, baked directly into Windows 11 (and increasingly, Windows 10 via updates, though that operating system is on borrowed time anyway). It sits behind an icon in the taskbar, and clicking it opens a chat panel on the right side of your screen. You can ask it questions, get it to summarise a document, have it rewrite an email, or ask it to change a setting on your PC. On newer hardware with a dedicated AI chip, there’s also “Click to Do” and some on-device features that don’t need the internet at all.
In plain terms: it’s a chatbot with some extra permissions to poke around your operating system. It’s not fundamentally different from using ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini in a browser tab, except it’s sitting one click away at all times and it can see a bit more of what’s happening on your desktop if you let it.
Is it actually useful, or just there
Here’s our honestly mixed take. For quick text tasks, drafting a reply to a landlord, summarising a long PDF, explaining an error message, Copilot is genuinely handy and saves real time. We’ve found it particularly good at taking a wall of technical jargon and turning it into something a normal person can understand, which, fittingly, is the whole premise of this website.
Where it falls flat is anything requiring precision or nuance about your specific files and settings. It can misread context, suggest the wrong fix, or confidently give you an answer that’s slightly off. If you’ve spent any time with ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini style tools already, Copilot inside Windows won’t surprise you much, it’s built on comparable technology, just wedged into your operating system rather than living in a browser tab.
Our mildly contrarian view: most people don’t need Copilot running by default on every PC, and Microsoft defaulting it to “on” for everyone was the wrong call. We’re not anti-AI, we use these tools daily. But bundling an assistant into the operating system itself, rather than letting people opt in the way they do with a browser extension or an app, nudges adoption in a way that feels more like a strategic land-grab for usage numbers than a feature genuinely requested by most Windows users. If you want it, fantastic, it’s a good tool. If you don’t, you shouldn’t have to go digging through four menus to get rid of it.
The privacy question Australians keep asking
We get a lot of messages along the lines of “is Copilot reading my files.” The honest answer is: Copilot only acts on what you explicitly ask it to look at or what you’ve granted it permission to see, similar to how any app requests access to your camera or location. It isn’t silently scanning your hard drive in the background. That said, anything you type into the Copilot chat window, like any cloud AI tool, may be processed on Microsoft’s servers rather than purely on your device, depending on the feature.
If privacy is a genuine concern for you, and it’s a reasonable one, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes plain-English guidance on how AI tools handle personal information, and it’s worth a read before you decide how much you’re comfortable sharing with any assistant, Copilot included. We’ve also covered this ground more broadly in our piece on the privacy cost of on-device AI, which digs into what’s actually happening when these tools process your data versus when they keep things local.
Copilot and gaming PCs specifically
Because gaming is our beat, here’s the bit that matters if you’re running Windows on a rig built for frame rates rather than spreadsheets. Copilot itself, sitting idle in the taskbar, has a negligible impact on performance. It’s not chewing through your GPU while you’re mid-raid. But some of the newer “Copilot+ PC” features, the ones tied to dedicated AI silicon in newer laptops, do run background processes for things like live captions and image generation, and on a machine that’s already working hard to push high frame rates in a demanding title, every bit of background CPU and RAM overhead matters more than Microsoft likes to admit.
If you’re the type who closes Discord before a ranked match because you don’t trust your frame times, you’ll probably want Copilot closed too, not because it causes stutter in our testing, but because the principle is the same: a lean system is a predictable system. We reckon that’s the right instinct even if the actual performance hit from Copilot alone is small on most hardware. If you’re shopping for a machine built with this stuff in mind, our rundown of best gaming laptops in Australia 2026 covers which models handle background AI features without stealing headroom from your games, and if you’re chasing frames on the desktop side our NVIDIA RTX 50 Series in Australia 2026 guide is still the one to check before buying a card.
How to turn off Copilot in Windows
Right, the part you came for. Microsoft hasn’t made this a single switch, annoyingly, so there are a few places to look depending on how thoroughly you want it gone.
- Right-click the taskbar, choose Taskbar settings, and switch off the Copilot toggle. This removes the icon from view, which is enough for most people.
- If Copilot still launches via a keyboard shortcut or reappears after an update, open Settings, go to Apps, then Installed apps, search for Copilot, and use the uninstall option where available. On some Windows 11 versions this fully removes it; on others it only disables the app while leaving some system integration in place.
- For readers comfortable with Group Policy (more common on work laptops managed by IT, but available on Pro editions of Windows at home too), there’s a policy setting under Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, that lets you turn Copilot off at a system level, which tends to stick through updates more reliably than the taskbar toggle alone.
A fair warning: Microsoft has, on a few occasions, reintroduced Copilot’s icon after a major feature update even for people who’d switched it off. It’s worth checking back after any big Windows update lands, particularly the twice-yearly feature updates, just to make sure the toggle hasn’t quietly reset itself.
Should you actually keep it running
This depends entirely on how you use your PC, and we don’t think there’s one right answer here. If you’re someone who already uses an AI assistant daily for work or study, having one built into the OS saves you a browser tab and a login. Readers who found value in our guide to AI tools for Australian students will likely find Copilot a reasonable extension of habits they already have.
If you’re mainly using your PC for gaming, browsing and the odd Word document, Copilot is unlikely to change your life either way, and turning it off costs you nothing. The people who get the most irritated are usually those who didn’t ask for it and feel like it was pushed on them without a clear opt-in, which, fair enough, is a legitimate gripe about how Microsoft rolled this out rather than about the tool’s underlying usefulness.
The bigger picture on AI arriving in Windows
Copilot isn’t going away, and if anything Microsoft’s roadmap suggests deeper integration over time, not less. Microsoft’s own Copilot support pages lay out the features currently shipping and which require newer AI-capable hardware versus which run on any Windows 11 machine. It’s a reasonable reference point if you want to know exactly what your specific PC can and can’t do with it, because the feature set genuinely varies by hardware generation, which is something a lot of coverage glosses over.
For anyone still running Windows 10, this whole conversation is a bit moot in the near term since Copilot’s deepest features are built around Windows 11. Worth remembering that free support for Windows 10 ended back in October last year, with the consumer Extended Security Updates programme now running through to October 2027 for anyone who’s enrolled. If you’re weighing up whether to upgrade partly because of features like this, it’s one more small data point in a much bigger decision.
Our verdict on Copilot in Windows
We don’t think Copilot is sinister, and we don’t think it’s essential either. It’s a genuinely capable assistant wearing an operating system’s clothing, useful for quick text tasks, unnecessary for a lot of day-to-day computer use, and mildly intrusive in the way it was switched on by default rather than offered as a choice. Our advice: give it a real go for a week on tasks like email drafts or document summaries before deciding. If it earns its spot in your taskbar, keep it. If it doesn’t, the off switch is right there, even if Microsoft didn’t exactly make it the first thing you see. Either way, it’s your PC, and the choice should be the easy part.
— Josh Tannenbaum, Gaming Writer, Tech Geek
