Microsoft Replaces OpenAI's Image Generation Models in PowerPoint and Bing

Microsoft has started replacing OpenAI's image-generation models with its own technology across several products: Bing Image Creator now runs entirely on Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.5, and PowerPoint and OneDrive already use it for image-editing and image-to-image features. The reason, per Microsoft itself, is straightforward — its own model is faster, cheaper, and produces better results.

According to Microsoft's own figures, switching to MAI-Image-2.5 in PowerPoint cuts GPU costs by 84-85% compared with OpenAI's GPT-Image-2, thurrott.com reports. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman laid out the logic behind the move plainly:

“It's faster, it's cheaper, it's higher quality, and it drives better retention.”

— Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI

Quote source: channelnews, citing a Bloomberg interview from July 23, 2026.

Microsoft's in-house MAI models now run in more than half of all Microsoft products and are being tested across the rest. A separate version, MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, targets professional media-generation tools — Microsoft's chief creative officer Rob Reilly called it "a strong leap forward" for that category.

This isn't a clean break with OpenAI, though — it's a targeted swap in the places where speed and cost matter most. For text tasks, Copilot still runs on GPT-5.6, which Microsoft named its preferred model just weeks earlier — we covered that decision here. The pattern looks less like Microsoft abandoning OpenAI and more like it moving specific, high-volume features onto its own infrastructure, product by product.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.