Microsoft says it has over 20M paid Copilot users, and they really are using it

Despite the lingering perception that no one really uses Copilot, Microsoft said Wednesday that its user base and engagement are growing for the AI tool that’s baked into M365 apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook email.

M365 Copilot now has 20 million paid enterprise Copilot seats, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call.

The company has quadrupled the number of companies paying for over 50,000 seats, Nadella said, noting that Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche have more than 90,000 seats. He pointed to the deal announced earlier this week with Accenture for over 740,000 seats. “Our largest Copilot win to date,” he said.

Plus, he insists that people are using it, engaging with Copilot as much as they do with email.

“Copilot queries per user were up nearly 20% quarter over quarter. To put this momentum in perspective, weekly engagement is now at the same level as Outlook,” he said. “This is like a daily habit of intense usage.”

He emphasized that Copilot is not dependent on any one model, like OpenAI.

“You now have access in chat to multiple models by default, with intelligent auto routing in agents with critique and counsel, you can use multiple models together to generate optimal responses,” he said.

Microsoft 365 supports Anthropic’s Claude, for instance.

In fact, Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss said on the quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, “Those Microsoft 365 Copilot numbers are super impressive and I think way ahead of most people’s expectations.”

Agent mode is one area that is driving usage, noting that “as of last week, Agent mode is now the default experience across Copilot and Word Excel and PowerPoint.”

Microsoft last week made its Copilot’s agentic capabilities generally available. This allows Copilot to take multi-step actions directly in the documents. “You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot,” Nadella said.