AI copilot
An AI copilot is an assistant embedded inside an existing product that suggests, drafts, or completes work while the user stays in control and approves each step. Unlike an autonomous agent, a copilot keeps a human in the loop — it speeds the person up rather than replacing them.
A copilot lives where the work already happens — a code editor, a CRM, an inbox, a dashboard — and offers context-aware help: drafting a reply, explaining a chart, suggesting the next field. The defining trait is that the human reviews and accepts. This makes copilots far safer to ship than full agents, because a wrong suggestion is caught before it does anything.
When building one, the product question is not 'how smart is the model' but 'how cheap is it to accept or reject a suggestion.' A copilot succeeds when accepting its output is one keystroke and ignoring it costs nothing. That demands tight integration into the host UI, low latency, and grounding (often via RAG) in the user's actual data — generic, slow, or intrusive suggestions get switched off fast.
// faq
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a copilot and an AI agent?
- A copilot suggests and waits for the human to approve each action; an agent decides and acts on its own across multiple steps. Copilots keep a person in the loop and are safer for high-stakes work. Agents are more powerful but need stronger guardrails and evals because mistakes execute without review.