Windows 11 may have moved the Start button to the center of the taskbar, but it appears that future versions of Windows may do away with it entirely.

At least, this was conjured up by comments made by Microsoft chief Satya Nadella in a pre-recorded conversation with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon during the announcement of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chip It is one of the possibilities of the future.

This is Qualcomm's new chip for laptops, which the company claims will outperform competitors such as Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake CPU and Apple's M2 chip. However, by the end of 2023, these comparisons are becoming outdated, as people are expected to purchase laptops with the latest 14th generation Intel Meteor Lake CPUs and Apple M3 chips.

With "AI" now the buzzword of the tech world, we can expect to see a lot of AI in the marketing of these new chips, and Qualcomm is no slouch in this area. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chip is built to run Windows on ARM and supports a number of "AI" workloads with the Qualcomm AI Engine. The chip has an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) that can run a generative AI LLM (Large Language Model) on the device, such as the one that powers Bing with ChatGPT.

Since AI was a major topic of discussion at Qualcomm's presentation, Nadella and Amon began talking about AI in Windows and where AI is headed in the next few years. Microsoft has been busy adding AI-assisted Microsoft Copilots to everything from Microsoft 365 to Windows 11, following its success with Bing with ChatGPT, and Nadella's vision for the future of AI and Windows during the conversation He was particularly thought provoking about the following.

"I think a new generation of AI PCs are emerging ......" Nadella said. [Copilot is like a start button. 'It becomes the orchestrator of the whole app experience. For example, I can go there and just state my intent and it will navigate me to the application or bring the application to the copilot.

It certainly sounds like we could see Copilot replace the Start button in a future version of Windows. And with Intel's leak earlier this year mentioning "Windows 12 support" and revealing that Windows 12 may be coming sooner than we think, it's not outlandish to think we might see it start as early as 2024! It is not.

Still, if Copilot is being considered as a replacement for the Start button, it will likely be some time before Microsoft pulls the trigger.

The Windows 11 update with Copilot was just released in September, so the tool is still in early preview, and we don't expect Microsoft to push it to the forefront of Windows anytime soon.