Since its inception, Outlook has been the quintessential email application. However, recently, and “thanks” to its web parts, Outlook has worsened. So much so that we Microsofters strongly recommend against using the new Outlook. Now comes the most profound, but not necessary, shift: Microsoft is reorganizing the Outlook team and will rebuild it “from the ground up” around AI, with Copilot at its core. In an internal memo obtained by The Verge‘s newsletter, Gaurav Sareen—the new direct product manager—describes Outlook as a “double” that reads your emails, suggests responses, prioritizes your inbox, and organizes your time. It’s not “putting AI on top of it,” it’s rethinking the client with weekly prototyping cycles and accelerated delivery.
What will this change in Outlook mean?
The vision is to move from a set of utilities to an assistant that “acts”: drafts, summarizes long threads, suggests the best time for a meeting, and automatically manages notifications and tasks. It’s the natural step after One Outlook (the unified web-based version) and the arrival of Copilot in the suite. Microsoft, in fact, already documents the feature comparison between the classic Outlook and the new one. In the latter, the assistive layer and simplified design gain importance.
If Outlook is the backbone of everyday life in thousands of companies, moving things around comes at a cost: Microsoft wants to experiment weekly and “change the culture” of the team to keep pace with AI. At the same time, it has to take care of the business: we recently saw a bug that prevented the classic Outlook from launching, and Microsoft recommended using the new client as a temporary solution, demonstrating that the transition isn’t trivial.
The plan comes after years of pushing One Outlook, which unifies Windows, Mac, and the web. The official roadmap and IT adoption resources already describe migration phases (opt-in, opt-out, and final cutoff). The message is clear: the web and AI are setting the pace for the desktop experience. We’ll see if it convinces us to migrate to this new Outlook.
