Where are the new Surface products? Yusuf Mehdi, MS Head of Consumer Marketing at Microsoft, a long time ago

The question right now is around how Microsoft continues to innovate on the hardware side. Panay was always a devices fan, having led the Surface Pro development that has seen companies like Apple, Dell, and Asus produce their own Surface-like devices. But Microsoft signaled changes in its hardware portfolio earlier this year amid layoffs. Is there still room for Surface to do innovative laptop and tablet designs like we’ve seen over the last decade, or does Microsoft’s push for AI overshadow the risky hardware bets?

YusufMehdi, Microsoft’s consumer marketing head, will now take on the responsibility of leading the Windows and Surface businesses outside. As a result, Microsoft no longer has a chief product officer because the title of Mehdi’s job title has not changed.

He first joined Microsoft in 1992, working on product management for Internet Explorer and Windows before helping lead Microsoft’s entry into search with Bing. His career at Microsoft has spanned three different CEOs — Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella — and a variety of different product launches. He’s been involved in Surface, the Windows 10 launch, and the HoloLens headset.

Microsoft probably wont bring any new features to Windows 12 that are powered by artificial intelligence, but many of its new features will lay the groundwork for a focus on Windows with artificial intelligence. “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows, quite literally,” said Panay earlier this year, so we’re likely going to hear the beginning of Microsoft’s work toward that reinvention.

The Future of Microsoft: Surface, Surface Neo, Surface Edge, Surface Laptop, Surface Go, and Surface Go 4 (via New Experiences)

The leader of the new experiences team is Mikhail Parakhin, who has been focusing on Bing chat in recent months.

Microsoft also turned to AI to help power its Surface smart camera recently, so there’s a chance we might see other accessories that leverage AI smarts for Surface.

“AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows,” Panay said earlier this year. Microsoft will no longer have the lead on how you use Windows. I can tell you that he hasn’t signaled a strategy change or change in direction for Windows at Microsoft.

Microsoft is rumored to have scrapped plans for a dual-screen Surface Duo 3, years after effectively canceling its Windows-powered Surface Neo dual-screen device. It’s not clear what the future holds for Microsoft’s own Android efforts. The originalSurface Duo reached its end of life with only two updates. Surface accessories have made Microsoft’s mice, keyboards, and webcams redundant.

The revenue of Microsoft’s Surface and devices has been badly hit this year as PC shipments have fallen. At the beginning of the PC boom, Nadella was looking at a future that extended beyond Windows, iPad, and Android. He joked in January 2020 that Windows could be called “Azure Edge” in the future to make it clear that cloud services are the biggest hardware business at Microsoft.

The event will include more than just Surface and Windows. I want to hear more about the plans for Copilot for Office apps from Microsoft. Microsoft put a steep price on Copilot in July, and it’s time we got a release date for when enterprise users will get access to this AI-powered future of Office documents.

Images of the Surface Go 4 haven’t leaked yet, but it’s expected to maintain a similar design to the prior Surface Go 3 model. Speaking of leaks, images of the Surface Laptop Go 3 have also appeared online. It looks very similar to the Surface Laptop Go 2, but the new model is rumored to ship with Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs and is also expected to ship in early October.

Artificial Intelligence-Powered Features in the Surface and Consumer Apps: What Can Microsoft Say About Their Product? The Case for Microsoft Surface Pro X

I think Microsoft will detail more than just Copilot. We’ve started seeing more AI-powered features appear in Windows apps, with test versions of the Snipping Tool and Photos app updated with useful features for copying text from screenshots and adding background blur to photos.

Paint is also rumored to be getting the AI treatment soon with text-to-image prompts to generate images automatically. Photos is also rumored to be getting a new feature to identify people or objects in photos and then cut / paste them elsewhere — much like a similar feature on iOS.

AI “will have a potentially profound impact on how you use your computer and how it will essentially evolve in regards to its form,” said Steven Bathiche, the head of Microsoft’s applied sciences group, in an interview with The Verge last year.

The Surface team has been focused on AI for years now with features like Windows Studio Effects. These first started shipping on the Arm-powered Surface Pro X in 2020 with a feature that automatically adjusts your eyes during a video call to make it appear like you’re always making eye contact through the camera.

Businesses will be able to quickly summarize documents, generate emails and speed up excel analysis with the Copilot in Office apps. Microsoft has an opportunity to brush off the competition of similar Artificial Intelligence-powered features in its products.

The preview of Bing chat in enterprise is essentially the same product that consumers can buy, but with added commercial data protection. I think we will get additional features for the Bing Chat enterprise and consumer versions once the preview is over.