The number of paying subscribers for Copilot has leaked, and it is a disaster. Now even reshaping Satya Nadella’s CEO role into tech leadership rather than delivering commercial results.
This article only talks about the number of Copilot 365 licences that are active. It doesn’t even consider the situations like my workplace, where everyone was given a licence but hardly anyone uses it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual usage rate for these licences is also very low, meaning the situation could be even more dire than the article makes out.
Well, Microsoft doesn’t care if you use it, only if the business buys the license.
Malware is what it is. I have a hard time getting rid of it on my machines.
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I can’t believe that the company famous for not listening to its users and forcing things on them that they did not ask for can’t quite understand why its users don’t want to use the thing that they didn’t ask for that they forced on them.
I have 20 years experience in IT process automation, with the last 15 spent in consulting. The number one thing I’ve learned is businesses don’t care about the technology. I could write the coolest automation that covers 99% of potential issues, but if it costs more to run than having a person in India push a button, they won’t buy it.
In terms of long-term costs, yeah, probably. But I work in software development, so investment budgets, and we definitely have the problem that investments into anything tangibly related to AI are encouraged.
We’ve genuinely been told by customers that they’d rather have the more expensive, worse solution that uses AI, because they will not get investment money, if it does not use AI. They want to be scammed, because their bosses have targets that say x% of all investments need to be towards AI. And those targets come straight from the investors.
Maybe they just like exploitation more than technology!
Microsoft learns that most people don’t want AI, only tech companies do. If they have a choice, they’re not going to use it, let alone pay for it.
To be real, a lot of tech companies also dont. Its the business majors in the said tech companies, who do
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Companies and workers are both scared of these systems, trying to figure them out, and yet completely uneducated on how to use them.
If you want to sell it at $30 a seat, you need to teach every single seat how to make $30 or more in gains a month by using it.
And a 1 hour lunch and learn isn’t going to fix that.
These systems shouldn’t be priced per seat, and regular users shouldn’t be doing almost anything with them until they get trained.
People aren’t impressed anymore when you slap AI to everything.
I pay for Claude and the CLI agent helps me a lot with boring stuff and that’s the only AI thing I will be ever paying for. I predict price increases, and if it will exceed 50 usd, I will be out and do the boring stuff myself.
The M365 Copilot numbers make sense — adoption doesn’t happen through hype; it happens through usefulness.
I’ve been experimenting with that idea myself in a small project — VSCoder Copilot, an Android app that brings quick AI coding assistance to mobile.
It’s not about replacing developers — it’s about giving them smarter tools wherever they are.
I don’t think 2% of M365 is necessarily bad numbers. Office is prevalent, for all kinds of and even the simplest of office work. Not everyone needs AI or has the technical expertise or awareness of what this offer even means. Some people may not have launched their Office for one or two years but still have a paid license.
There’s also a free copilot for GitHub users, which may be necessary as a teaser and testing, and adoption. That may also offset “adoption” by measure of commercial licenses instead of active users.
I didn’t like the initial focus on that number of sold licenses in the article. Of course, they expand upon it and draw a broader picture afterwards.
There’s a Copilot button on the taskbar, notepad and paint. If you still can’t convert users you’re doing pretty bad.
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Cool - so you agree they’re not clicking Copilot and therefore it’s not converting?
It would not be a bad number if you did not consider that Microsoft was pouring all of its formidable resources into pushing it.
AI = commercial failure
Not surprising, these services are largely useless and there’s so many free/self-hosting copies already.
