Microsoft’s Copilot advertising has been criticized by an industry watchdog for its productivity claims and confusing use of Copilot branding. The Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division (NAD) has reviewed Microsoft’s Copilot advertising, and recommended that the software giant discontinues or modifies productivity claims about Microsoft 365 Copilot and more clearly disclose the limitations of its Business Chat feature.

Microsoft has been claiming that Copilot has productivity and return on investment (ROI) benefits for businesses that adopt the AI assistant, including that “67%, 70%, and 75% of users say they are more productive” after a certain amount of Copilot usage. “NAD found that although the study demonstrates a perception of productivity, it does not provide a good fit for the objective claim at issue,” says the watchdog in its review. “As a result, NAD recommended the claim be discontinued or modified to disclose the basis for the claim.”

Alongside the recommended productivity advertising changes, NAD also suggests that users of Copilot could be confused by Microsoft’s wide use of the Copilot branding across multiple products — including Business Chat. “NAD concluded, based on the context of the claims and universal use of the product description as ‘Copilot,‘ that consumers would not necessarily understand the differences.” NAD has recommended that Microsoft now “modify its advertising to clearly and conspicuously disclose any material limitations related to how Business Chat assists users.”

Microsoft has had years of confusing branding for Copilot. Microsoft relaunched its Copilot for business with free AI chat and pay-as-you-go agents earlier this year, in an attempt to simplify some of its branding woes. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat as it’s known now, started off as Bing Chat Enterprise before Microsoft then rebranded it, confusingly, to just Copilot. Somewhere in the middle of all this rebranding, Business Chat — which was originally a chatbot in Teams — is now Business Chat for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

As I wrote in Notepad almost a year ago, Microsoft has been rebranding Copilot in the most Microsoft way possible. It’s all part of trying to make businesses use Copilot more, and then pay extra for the Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription.

Microsoft says it disagrees with NAD’s conclusions, but that it “will follow NAD’s recommendations for clarifying its claims.” Hopefully that means that Copilot branding is going to be clearer in the future.