Do you need a Copilot+ PC for Microsoft Copilot?

The answer, from Microsoft's own requirements page

Microsoft's requirements page for Microsoft Copilot, updated on 31 October 2026, opens with a note that Microsoft 365 Copilot is now named Microsoft Copilot. The page then lists what a user needs: an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, a Microsoft Copilot license, a work or school account in Microsoft Entra ID, an Exchange Online mailbox for the experiences that use mail and calendar data, supported Microsoft 365 apps, a supported browser, and a network that lets Copilot traffic through. It names no processor, no neural processing unit and no minimum memory. Copilot does its work in Microsoft's cloud, on the PCs, Macs, browsers and phones your users already have.

A Copilot+ PC is a different thing with a similar name. Microsoft defines it by hardware, on top of the Windows 11 minimums: a processor or system on a chip with a neural processing unit, or NPU, that can perform 40 or more trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16 GB of DDR5 or LPDDR5 memory, and 256 GB of SSD or UFS storage. The NPU runs a set of Windows features on the device itself. Those features are separate from the Microsoft Copilot license, and a user with that license gets the same Copilot in Word, Outlook and Teams on an ordinary Windows 11 laptop.

What Microsoft lists, and which team owns each part

Each requirement belongs to a different team, and none of them sits in the hardware budget. The table follows the requirements page.

Two lines on the page that matter for fleet planning

Microsoft Copilot is not available with device-based licensing for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, so a shared PC licensed per device does not become a Copilot seat whatever hardware it has.

Microsoft also asks you to allow the entire cloud.microsoft domain, because it does not support allowing only selected Microsoft 365 application URLs within it, and to confirm full WebSocket connectivity through proxies and firewalls. Both are configuration work for your network and endpoint teams, and a new PC changes neither.

What a Copilot+ PC adds on the device

Microsoft's Windows 11 specifications page lists the Copilot+ PC experiences and says they need an NPU of 40 or more TOPS to work as intended. These are the ones most likely to matter at work, with the conditions Microsoft attaches to each.

• Click to Do reads the text or image on screen and offers actions on it, and opens with the Windows key and Q. Its summarize and rewrite actions run on Phi Silica, a small language model that ships with Windows on Copilot+ PCs and runs on the NPU. Microsoft's management page says Click to Do is enabled for users by default and gives admins a Disable Click to Do policy.
• Improved Windows search lets people find documents, photos and settings by describing them in their own words, in File Explorer, the taskbar search box and Settings. Microsoft notes that it works with specific text, image and document formats and is optimized for a set of languages.
• Live Captions translates the audio and video playing on the PC into English subtitles from more than 40 languages, and into Chinese (Simplified) from 27.
• Windows Studio Effects improves the camera and microphone on calls with background blur, eye contact, automatic framing and voice focus. Microsoft's support page says those four also run on PCs with a smaller NPU, while effects such as portrait light and creative filters need a Copilot+ PC with a Snapdragon processor.
• Recall (preview) saves snapshots of the screen on the device and lets the user search them in plain language. Microsoft states that Recall is disabled and removed by default on managed devices. IT has to allow it by policy, each user then opts in, and the device needs Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security, device encryption and 50 GB of free space.
• Photos and Paint add image features such as Super resolution, Restyle image and Cocreator, and Microsoft notes that the generative ones need a Microsoft account or Entra ID and an internet connection.

Which roles might use on-device AI

Microsoft publishes no list of roles that need a Copilot+ PC, so what follows is our reading of the feature list against the work people do. Use it to start the conversation with each department.

• People on camera for much of the day, such as account managers, recruiters and support leads, get the most from Windows Studio Effects, and from Live Captions when a call or a recording is in another language.
• Teams that work across languages get translated subtitles for audio and video that plays on the PC, including recorded training.
• Marketing and communications staff who edit images can use the Photos and Paint features.
• Developers who build Windows applications that call on-device models need an NPU to test against, since Phi Silica ships with Windows on Copilot+ PCs.
• Knowledge workers in documents all day will use Click to Do and the improved search, though the cloud Copilot already summarizes and drafts for them.

Why Windows 11 readiness comes first

Every Copilot+ PC runs Windows 11, and Windows 11 is also where Copilot keeps improving in the desktop apps. Microsoft's page on Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Apps states that devices running the apps on Windows 10 receive feature updates and Copilot support, where eligible, until Version 2608 is released, and then remain on Version 2608 with security updates only until 10 October 2028. A Windows 10 PC can use Copilot today. It stops getting new Copilot features in Word, Excel, Outlook and the other desktop apps once Version 2608 ships.

Windows 10 itself left support on 14 October 2025. Microsoft Learn prices commercial Extended Security Updates at $61 per device for year one, doubling each year and cumulative, so a device enrolling now in year two pays $183 for years one and two together. That money keeps the operating system patched and buys nothing for Copilot.

So the order of work is the Windows 11 count, then the AI PC question. Devices that meet the Windows 11 requirements upgrade in place at no hardware cost. Devices that cannot are already in the replace or right-size queue, and that queue is where the AI PC decision belongs: a seat being replaced anyway can take a Copilot+ PC if its role calls for one. Replacing a healthy, Windows 11 ready device buys a whole PC for features its user may never open.

How a device export shows which seats already meet the bar

The inventory you already hold answers this. The bar has two parts, the Windows 11 requirements and the Copilot+ hardware, and both show up in the same exports once the right columns are in them. For the export paths, see our guides to the Intune export and the Configuration Manager views.

Reading the rows together

A device with a processor on the list, 16 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage is already a Copilot+ PC. Fleets that refreshed in the last two years may hold some, bought for battery life or weight. A device with the right processor and 8 GB of memory does not qualify, and Microsoft's specification page says so: devices with fewer than 16 GB of RAM or lower storage configurations are not Copilot+ PCs even when the NPU reaches 40 TOPS. A device with an older processor will never qualify, and the only question for it is whether it can take Windows 11.

We run the same checks when we score a fleet. Windows 11 readiness is one of the five signals in the verdict model, and an AI PC is a class assigned on evidence of need, like the Engineer class, rather than a default for every Knowledge Worker seat. Our sample report shows the Windows 11 readiness count next to the verdict split on a fictional 7,400-device fleet.

Before you buy AI PCs for Copilot

Gartner wrote in February 2026 that rising AI PC prices will delay the projected 50 percent market penetration of AI PCs until 2028, and it expects average PC prices in 2026 to be 17 percent higher than in 2025. At those prices, a Copilot+ PC bought for a seat whose current device is healthy is a full purchase made for features its user may not use.

Before the order goes out, count the seats that can take Windows 11 on the device they have and the devices that already meet the Copilot+ bar, then mark the due seats in the roles that will use on-device AI. The initial report gives you the Windows 11 readiness count and the verdict split for your fleet from an export, and the readout is the place to bring the list of roles you have in mind.

Common questions