OpenAI Retires Custom GPTs: Are Microsoft Copilot Agents Next?

OpenAI has just announced that it's retiring custom GPTs. So, if you've spent time building agents inside

Microsoft Copilot, there's probably one fairly obvious question. Are Copilot agents next? And should we be looking at

what OpenAI has just done as a bit of an early warning sign? Well, based on what Microsoft is saying publicly right now,

the answer is no. In fact, Microsoft seems to be heading in the opposite direction. They're still investing

pretty heavily in agents through Microsoft 365, C-Pilot, Copilot Studio, and Agent 365. And Agent 365 is actually

designed specifically to help organizations manage, govern, and secure agents. So, right now, there really

isn't any evidence that Microsoft is preparing to retire them. But there is one development that I think is worth

keeping an eye on. Copilot Co-work now supports skills and that means you can create your own reusable skills that

tell co-work how you want a particular task or workflow completed for things like your reporting, erocess, proposal

writing, research method, or even the way you create content. And when you look at that, it starts to sound

remarkably similar to the direction Open AI is now heading. But here's where it gets interesting. Microsoft isn't

currently positioning skills as a replacement for agents. They're actually putting skills inside agents. Microsoft

has recently added custom skills as a component of declarative agents. And Copilot Studio agents using the newer

GitHub copilot architecture can also contain skills. So the architecture is starting to look a bit more like this.

The agent decides what needs to happen and then the skills help teach it how to do the individual pieces of work. And I

think that distinction is really important. A skill is basically a reusable capability. So it might contain

things like your instructions, y process, templates, reference material, and the rules you want the AI to follow.

Whereas an agent can potentially bring all of that together. It might have knowledge, skills, tools, workflows,

data, and actions. And depending on how it's built, it can actually go off and do work on your behalf. Now, this next

bit is definitely more speculation. One thing I've noticed over the last few years is that Microsoft quite often

adopts patterns that we first see emerging from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, sometimes a few months later.

So, I do think OpenAI retiring custom GPTs is worth paying attention to. Not because Microsoft has said agents are

disappearing. They haven't. But because skills could eventually make some of those really simple agents unnecessary.

Think about it this way. Imagine ordinary co-pilot chat eventually being able to use your skills as easily as

co-work does today. Do I really need a separate proposal agent if I can just ask co-pilot to create a proposal and it

automatically uses my proposal writing skill? Do I need separate little agents for marketing, research, writing, or

reporting if the main AI can simply grab the right skill when it needs it? And that to me is where this starts getting

really interesting because that's effectively the question Open AI has just answered with custom GPTs. But I

definitely wouldn't write off agents yet. Microsoft has just launched an entire platform called Agent 365

specifically to manage agents at enterprise scale and they're still investing in agent builder co-pilot

studio autonomous workflows and agent governance. So that's a pretty significant commitment and more

sophisticated agents that need their own purpose tools permissions workflows triggers and governance still solve a

very different problem from a reusable skill. So, are co-pilot agents about to disappear? There's absolutely no

evidence of that today. But could skills gradually replace some of those smaller specialized agents that are really just

a set of instructions wrapped around an AI? I think that's the bit worth watching because for me, the interesting

question isn't really will agents disappear. It's which jobs still need a dedicated agent once the AI itself can

just load the skills it needs. and OpenAI may have just given us the first glimpse of where that could eventually

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