If you have a Windows 11 machine that you've been unable to use Microsoft Copilot on, this may be because you live in the European Union (EU). I recently sat down to figure out why I didn't have Copilot (to be honest, I wasn't too bothered about it up until now), and it turned out that it wasn't a problem with my PC, but rather, with my region. There used to be ways to use a run command to get around this restriction, but now Microsoft seems to have disabled them. While you can try following the below steps, this may no longer work on your PC.

Over the last few months, Microsoft has been rolling out Copilot to both EU and US users of the operating system, so you might already have this feature installed on your PC or laptop. If so, you don't need to do anything. This is also not related to Copilot+, which is the name Microsoft gives to the AI workloads that run on-device. You can only use those features on Snapdragon X Elite laptops at present.

How you can try enable Microsoft Copilot on any Windows 11 computer

Step 1: Create a shortcut

The first step is to create a shortcut.

1. Right-click anywhere in any folder and hover over New -> Shortcut (I kept the folder on my desktop for ease of access).
2. Type the location. In this case, type C:\Windows\explorer.exe "microsoft-edge:///ux=copilot&tcp=1&source=taskbar".
3. Give your shortcut a name. I named mine Copilot.exe.
4. Click OK.
5. Click Change icon.
6. Browse for an icon. This will have to be an .ico file; you can convert the Microsoft Copilot logo to an .ico file with any online converter.
7. Click OK.

At this point, the shortcut should already be functioning. We're going to give it a bit more flair, though, to integrate it in a way that it works like Copilot should.

Step 2: Add the shortcut to your taskbar

You can add the shortcut to your taskbar by dragging it to the bottom of the screen. You can then invoke it at any stage by clicking it, and Copilot will appear. You will have much the same experience as other people who have Copilot set up as part of a standard Windows install, but you can go a step further to add support for hotkeys if you want.

Step 3: Access Copilot anywhere

Setting up a hotkey is pretty easy, and this gives you similar functionality to what a Windows 11 user with Copilot preinstalled experiences.

1. Right-click the shortcut you created.
2. Click the box beside Shortcut key.
3. Press the key combination you want to set to invoke Copilot.

You can't use Windows key+C, but you can use any other key combination that doesn't involve the Windows key.

You should now hopefully be able to use Copilot if you couldn't already. You don't need to go out and pick up a new PC or anything; this will tide you over until Microsoft eventually releases Copilot to everyone. Per my testing, it can't be used to modify Windows settings or launch applications, but it'll happily advise you about practically everything else. If you don't have the feature and these steps didn't work, there doesn't really seem to be an easily accessed workaround at present.