Editor's take: Windows 11 brought a slew of UI changes and "improvements" few users welcome. File Explorer's state is particularly dire, yet Microsoft shows no sign of backing off its relentless quest to make the interface worse. What should be a simple file manager is now a confusing mess, frustrating longtime users and driving a flood of third-party fixes. Microsoft's revamp of the Windows 11 File Explorer context menu hid or removed many helpful features, sparking a boom in third-party tools to restore the old interface. Once again, Microsoft is reinventing the wheel with a redesigned Start Menu that brings more frustrating changes to the right-click menu. The Redmond corporation has added a new "AI action" sub-menu to File Explorer's context menu. This change is already available to unpaid beta testers in the Windows Insider program with the recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26200.5603released to the Dev Channel. Microsoft explains that AI actions in File Explorer offer a deeper interaction with users' files through AI technology. The first four AI actions focus on image editing. Bing Visual Search helps find similar pictures online. Blur Background and Erase Objects automatically detect and modify objects and backgrounds in Photos. Remove Background lets users extract an image's background in Paint. The four AI context menu options support JPG and PNG files but hardly represent an AI revolution. These new actions directly link Bing search or image-editing features from the File Explorer menu – nothing extraordinary about that. Microsoft plans to launch new Copilot-powered AI actions in the coming weeks. Microsoft 365 subscribers will soon get a new "Summarize" option to generate summaries of larger documents – Word, PDF, or TXT – stored on OneDrive and SharePoint. Microsoft also has a "Create an FAQ" feature that utilizes Copilot's chatbot to transform cloud documents into a neatly formatted, AI-generated Q&A list. // Related Stories The new Microsoft 365-exclusive AI actions sound far more promising than a handful of shortcuts to AI tools in a couple of Windows-native image editors. Still, I'd bet a kidney they won't ease the frustration for anyone who's disliked Windows 11 File Explorer since day one. Microsoft's new mission is to bring AI everywhere, so get ready to welcome your fully AI-powered Windows operating system sooner than you think. #windows #file #explorer #keeps #getting