Copilot

A copilot is an AI assistant embedded inside an application — helping you write, code, or work without leaving the tool you are already in. It is less flashy than a fully autonomous agent, but structurally it matters enormously because copilots are everywhere: baked into editors, office suites and developer tools, they drive a large share of the total inference the industry serves. That ubiquity is the point — small per-query costs, multiplied across constant everyday use, add up to a strategic load on the compute layer.

If serving costs stop declining, the economics get uncomfortable fast, because copilots run on thin margins that only work when the cost of each interaction keeps falling. The exposure runs to the companies weaving assistants into their products: Apple across its devices, Salesforce, SAP and Snowflake inside enterprise software, Adobe in creative work, and vertical specialists like legal-focused Harvey. For them scale is both the opportunity and the pressure — the more the copilot is used, the more its unit cost decides whether it earns its keep.