Have you ever done a grand reveal of something you've worked really hard on, expecting a ton of praise, but were instead met with indifference, or worse, disdain? Well, that's how I'm imagining how Microsoft is feeling right now about its grand Windows agentic reveal. It likely expected us to adore the idea of our Windows 11 PCs filling to the brim with AI agents, all of which are trained to help us get stuff done in the best way possible. Instead, we've told Microsoft where it can take its AI agents, and it's a little confused as to why.

Unfortunately, despite Microsoft's enthusiasm for an agentic Windows, nobody outside of the Redmond office wants it. So, here's why Microsoft investing in an AI-powered Windows is a bad idea.

Copilot aims to offer services that nobody is asking for

Filling a niche that doesn't exist

In my coverage of Microsoft being confused as to why people aren't enthusiastic about an agentic Windows, I mentioned a post from @vxunderground. The post was a reply to the AI CEO of Microsoft, Mustafa Suleyman, who found the idea of people disliking Copilot "mindblowing."

In the post, @vxunderground mentions that Copilot feels like a solution to a problem that nobody has. And I have to agree with them, here. When Microsoft decided to roll out Copilot to every facet of its software, I don't think it was reading legitimate feedback asking for the features. I believe that the company felt, "Well, this feature is clearly really good, so we'll just add it and people will love it for what it is."

And yes, AI tools can be impressive. The world of LLMs has come leaps and bounds over the past few years, and now we can generate images and text like never before. However, an awe-inspiring tool that nobody really feels the need to use is an unwanted tool.

I don't think I'm alone when my experience with LLMs was a few hours of messing around with one, admiring how powerful it was, and then shelving it for months on end until I wanted to prod it again. I don't feel any internal desire to use AI agents. They're just things that are sitting around, which you can boot up once in a blue moon to draw a funny picture of Mario fighting Sonic or something. And yet Microsoft is finding even more ways to add them to our PCs, even though we're not really engaging with what's already been given to us.

Copilot (and other AI assistants) still make errors

I don't want an assistant who does a worse job than I do

So, I'm not singling out Copilot for this one. This goes out to every LLM on the planet. Sometimes, when you use a chatbot or an AI assistant, it will make an error. Maybe it'll hallucinate something, maybe the information it trained on was bad, and maybe it miscontrues what you said and does something other than what you want.

Because of that, if Microsoft loaded a ton of AI agents on my PC and told me to go wild with them, I would hesitate to actually use them. Using agents is like a gamble; they can either save you a ton of time, or they really muck up what you're working on and you need to spend time repairing the damage it did.

In a way, that makes Copilot a riskier digital assistant than Cortana. Cortana didn't have the ability to parse sentences into commands, but at least its responses were pre-programmed so it couldn't mess something up too bad. Giving that same power to Copilot? I'm not sure if I want to trust it to do what I want it to do.

I mean, did you see the demo of Copilot Actions on Windows 11? Someone asked Copilot to change the text size for their grandma, and instead of bringing them to the Accessibility screen, it went through the Display options instead. It then asked the user to set the scale to an option it was already set to. I don't want that; I'd rather Google the solution and do it myself.

Windows users want more control, not less

Give them back the reins

I feel the real nail in the coffin is that an agentic OS implies a system that we don't have control over. The definition of "agentic" is a system where most of the work is done by an AI without user intervention. So, an agentic Windows would likely get the news for you, download apps for you, and may even troubleshoot issues.

But Windows users don't want Microsoft telling them what to do. In fact, there's been a bloody battle between Microsoft and fans of local accounts for years now, as Microsoft tries to squash every means of skipping signing into a Microsoft account during Windows 11's setup. People want control over their operating system, to use it and tweak it and edit it as they please. So, when Windows tries to tell its userbase that Microsoft knows their needs better than them, people get mad. And understandably so.

An agentic Windows is a huge evolution that nobody asked for

I'm not here to say that an agentic Windows would be unimpressive. I'm sure Microsoft can make some excellent AI tools. What I am saying is that an agentic system is the reverse of what people want. People want control and precision without the fluff, and Copilot seems like the inverse of that.