What Does Copilot Actually Do in Windows 11

Copilot is now embedded into Windows 11 at the OS level — but what it actually does depends entirely on which machine you’re running it on. There’s a meaningful split between standard Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs that most coverage glosses over. Here’s what you actually get, and what requires new hardware.

The split you need to understand first

Microsoft uses the word “Copilot” to describe two fairly different things, and conflating them is the source of most of the confusion around AI in Windows 11.

The first is the Copilot assistant — the AI chat interface accessible via the Win+C shortcut on any Windows 11 PC. No specialist hardware needed. It’s cloud-based, runs on any compatible machine, and handles text: drafting, summarising, answering questions, explaining settings in plain English. Useful, increasingly capable, and included in every Windows 11 licence.

The second is the Copilot+ PC feature set — Recall, Click to Do, semantic search, Live Captions with real-time translation. These run locally on a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and are exclusive to hardware that meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ requirements. Your current PC almost certainly doesn’t qualify unless you bought it in the last year specifically for that purpose.

The rest of this article covers both tiers clearly, so you know exactly what you’re getting on your current machine and what would require new hardware.

What Copilot does on any Windows 11 PC

Since May 2025, pressing Win+C opens a lightweight Copilot prompt box — a quick-access input that sits over your current window without launching a separate app. For M365 subscribers signed into a work or school account, this connects to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with enterprise data protection. For everyone else, it’s the consumer Copilot with web grounding.

In practice, the everyday use cases are genuinely useful rather than impressive in a demo sense. Copilot can summarise a long document you’ve just opened, rewrite a paragraph that isn’t quite working, generate an outline before you start drafting, or walk you through a settings change without you having to navigate menus you don’t use often. The cumulative effect across a working day is real — not transformative, but consistently time-saving.

Voice arrived in November 2025. “Hey Copilot” as a wake word now works hands-free when your PC is unlocked, and voice responses are grounded in the same web and work data as text. Microsoft’s documentation confirms that no audio is stored — transcripts are handled the same way as regular Copilot text conversations under existing retention policies.

From December 2025, you can hover over any open app on the taskbar and share its window directly with Copilot. Copilot Vision then reads what’s on screen and responds to questions about it — useful for anything you’re reading or reviewing without wanting to copy-paste text manually.

Copilot+ PCs — what they actually require

To access Recall, Click to Do, and semantic file search, your machine needs to qualify as a Copilot+ PC. Microsoft’s official specifications are precise: an NPU capable of at least 40 TOPS, 16GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD minimum.

One practical issue worth calling out: several manufacturers advertise machines with “90+ TOPS” by combining CPU, GPU, and NPU figures. The Copilot+ qualification uses the NPU figure only. A chip that hits 13 TOPS on the NPU but 90 TOPS combined doesn’t qualify, regardless of how it appears in marketing materials. If you’re buying specifically for Copilot+ features, look for the official Copilot+ badge rather than the headline TOPS number.

There’s no upgrade path. Existing machines cannot be converted to Copilot+ PCs — the NPU has to be in the silicon. If your current machine doesn’t qualify, it won’t gain access to these features regardless of which version of Windows 11 it runs.

Recall — what it actually is now

Recall had a difficult launch. Security researchers found that early preview builds stored snapshots in unencrypted plain text — a serious problem for a feature capturing your screen every few seconds. Microsoft paused the rollout, rebuilt the storage model, and released it broadly from April 2025 with a substantially different architecture.

The version that shipped is fully opt-in and off by default. Enabling it requires a deliberate choice during Copilot+ PC setup, and it won’t turn on without Windows Hello configured with biometric authentication. All snapshots are stored locally, encrypted with BitLocker or Device Encryption, and processed on the NPU — nothing leaves your machine. Microsoft explicitly states that snapshots are not shared with Microsoft, not shared with third parties, and not accessible between user accounts on the same device.

What it does is straightforward: it takes encrypted screenshots of your active window every few seconds, then lets you search across them using natural language. “That contract I was reviewing last Tuesday” finds it. “The article about Q3 projections” finds it. You don’t need to remember a filename or which app it was in. Password fields are automatically excluded from capture, as is content from private browsing sessions in Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

Whether it’s worth enabling depends on your workflow. For anyone who regularly loses track of things they were working on, it’s genuinely useful. For anyone handling sensitive client data on a shared machine, the off switch is right there in Settings → Privacy and security → Recall and snapshots.

Click to Do and semantic search

Click to Do (Copilot+ PCs only) surfaces contextual actions on whatever’s on your screen. Press Win and click, and the feature reads the text or image under your cursor and offers relevant options: visual search, copy, rewrite, translate, remove background. It’s context-aware rather than clipboard-based, which makes it faster for the kind of quick one-off tasks that don’t justify opening another application.

Semantic search is the more consistently useful addition. On Copilot+ PCs, Windows Search now understands content rather than just filenames. Searching for “red barn” returns documents and images containing a red barn, whether or not that phrase appears in the filename. It runs on the NPU and works offline. For anyone who stores files with vague names or in inconsistent locations — which is most people — this is noticeably better than what Windows Search has been for the past decade.

Windows 11 Pro and Copilot in managed environments

For businesses running managed devices, Windows 11 Pro provides the administrative controls that Home doesn’t. Copilot features — including the Copilot key behaviour, which Copilot apps launch, and (for Copilot+ PCs) whether Recall and Click to Do are available — can all be managed via Group Policy, Intune, and Microsoft Entra.

The Copilot key itself can be remapped via Group Policy on Pro machines. If you’ve deployed hardware with Copilot keys and want them to open Search instead, or do nothing, that’s configurable without user involvement. Coming through 2026, Microsoft is adding further Intune and Entra controls for agentic Copilot capabilities — relevant if your organisation is starting to explore AI agents rather than just the assistant.

For Recall specifically: enterprise management requires Recall to be explicitly enabled at the policy level for commercial organisations. It’s off by default in managed environments, and IT admins control whether users can turn it on. Microsoft Purview integration is available for organisations that need data loss prevention controls applied to Recall content.