It always shows up at a bad time. I honestly don't remember what I was doing when a brand new Edge search bar appeared dead center at the top of my desktop. I didn't ask for it. Nobody asked me. It was just there.

So I did what Microsoft keeps telling me to do. I asked Copilot, the AI assistant I pay Microsoft for, how to get rid of a thing Microsoft put on my computer.

Copilot told me to right-click it. Right-click did nothing. I may have told Copilot it was a m*ron. From there it turned into twenty questions: try Alt+F4, open Task Manager, check the Alt+Tab thumbnail, send a screenshot. Meanwhile I poked around on my own, found the toggle and turned it off.

Why Copilot Troubleshooting Turned Into Twenty Questions

To be fair to Copilot, it told me exactly why it was stuck. A search bar at the top of the desktop "could have been" Edge Bar, Microsoft Search, Copilot-related UI, Microsoft Start, PowerToys Run, an OEM utility, or "something else entirely." Its own words: "I'd just be making random guesses."

Read that list again. Almost all of it is Microsoft. Microsoft's own AI could not tell which of Microsoft's own features Microsoft had put on my screen.

When I told it I'd found the fix faster than asking the AI I pay for, and that maybe I should start paying myself, it agreed:

"In your defense, when you're staring at a thing you didn't ask for and just want it gone, spending 30 seconds poking around yourself can absolutely beat a back-and-forth troubleshooting session."

Then it added this, with a laughing emoji: "if you billed your own time at your actual hourly rate, there are probably plenty of days where you'd conclude you're a lot more expensive than the AI." Thanks, buddy.

The Microsoft Bloatware Problem Is Really a Sales Problem

There is never a good time to invade people's privacy and space. I know that sounds a little dramatic. But people are busy, and having a tech company throw things at you with little to no warning, things that aren't even useful, wears thin.

So many of the search paths on Windows lead somewhere Microsoft wants you to go: Edge, which I don't use and wish I could uninstall, the app store, this, that. It's a sales ecosystem being shoved down your throat, and it's built so it's hard to rid your computer of it. There's always something being thrown at you.

Copilot launched the same way. It was everywhere. Get it, get it, get it. Overpromise, underdeliver. And when you push back on why the answers keep being wrong, you get pointed to that little label at the bottom of the screen saying AI can make mistakes. Don't look behind the curtain.

What the AI Assistant Time Cost Really Looks Like

The fix took 30 seconds. The conversation didn't stop there. Once a Copilot session starts going badly, I can't help but see how bad it's going to get. A quick question turns into a 45 minute detour, sometimes an hour. This one got pretty bad, and the next four parts of this series came out of it.

In marketing, your time is money. If you're paying for Copilot seats right now, here's what I'd look at:

• Count the detours, not the answers. We logged ours. Our original Copilot audit recorded 129 confirmed issues and 56.3 hours lost.

• Time the human path. If your team can find the answer faster on their own, the assistant is a cost, not a tool.

• Look at what's carrying the load. When you do see Copilot work, it's usually inside a very, very carefully built workflow that takes most of the burden off Copilot. That's real effort, and you're paying for it.

Who Ends Up Doing the Work

Whoever is sitting at the other end of that computer. Copilot doesn't just fail to do what you ask. It creates more work for you. Or it lays out a path to success that doesn't exist, which makes it a path to a dead end.

Anybody but Copilot is doing the work.

That's Part 1 of The Copilot Chronicles. In Part 2, I ask Copilot a simple question: how often are you wrong? It answers with a number it made up.