A year ago today, Microsoft unveiled its ambitious plans for an AI-powered Bing search engine. It was the biggest launch in the history of Bing, helped push AI usage even further into the mainstream, and spurred a wave of dreams and panic about what AI could impact next. The launch was even successful enough to rattle Google, which was quickly seen as falling behind on artificial intelligence.

The strategy worked. But one year later, Bing seems to have fallen out of the conversation. Google is still at over 91 percent of traditional search market share, according to StatCounter, and ChatGPT has rocketed to 100 million weekly users, all while Bing grew by less than half of a percent in the search market globally.

Microsoft doesn’t necessarily see this as a failure. “We’ve seen [Bing] share grow,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. The launch may not have “completely reshaped the search landscape,” Mehdi says, but it’s been enough to matter for Microsoft. “Even a few points of share growth is significant for Microsoft and for customers to bring more competition.”

But while Bing may not have exploded, Microsoft’s AI ambitions did. Over the past year, the company has launched AI features inside just about everything: there’s AI in Office apps, AI features inside Windows apps like Paint, and even a dedicated AI key for laptops. Anywhere you look, Microsoft has some sort of AI feature — and this isn’t about to slow down.

But instead of Bing in the driver’s seat, Microsoft has pivoted to Copilot, an “AI companion” that the company is gradually placing inside all of its key software and services. Microsoft has now created a Super Bowl ad for Copilot that will air on Sunday. After a rebranding away from Bing a few months ago, Copilot is now being positioned as the future of Microsoft’s AI efforts, which are leaning more into productivity and creation than just search.

Image creation has become so popular inside Copilot because Microsoft has been offering it to anyone free of charge. That’s great for ease of use, but it does open up these tools to abuse. Microsoft had to close a loophole in its AI image generator that could create explicit images of celebrities. AI-generated images of Taylor Swift became a trending topic on X last month, with reports that people were creating and trading similar images using the Microsoft Designer AI image creator. Microsoft CEO Nadella called the AI fakes “alarming and terrible,” and Microsoft said last week that it was “continuing to investigate these images and have strengthened our existing safety systems to further prevent our services from being misused to help generate images like them.”

Outside of image creation, many users of Copilot are using it for programming to write code, research, and analysis, Mehdi says, but there’s still a lot of searching going on. “In the five billion chats we’ve talked about, I would say the predominant number of chats are essentially searches, roughly 70 percent,” says Mehdi.

It’s clear the shift away from search as the primary AI entry point for Microsoft is also impacting how Copilot shows up in various products and services. It has been a confusing year for the Copilot brand, which started off inside GitHub and then appeared in some sales products before receiving a bigger push as the Microsoft 365 Copilot inside Office apps. That eventually got rebranded to Copilot for Microsoft 365, but it felt like every department at Microsoft was busy launching separate Copilots without a single and clear effort.

That seems to be changing now. “We want to get to where there’s a single Copilot for every individual,” reveals Mehdi. “That Copilot can then add capabilities as you subscribe to them.” So in the future, if you subscribe to Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365, that’s just an add-on to the main Copilot.