Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft’s $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming.
That single percentage stat undermines the company’s carefully polished Copilot success story. On its Q2 FY26 earnings call, Microsoft repeatedly cited “record” AI momentum, telling investors it now has 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, with seat growth up more than 160 percent year-over-year. Satya Nadella described Copilot as “becoming a true daily habit,” claiming daily active users are up tenfold year-over-year and that average conversations per user have doubled.
What Microsoft did not articulate is how small that paid footprint looks against the vast base of Microsoft 365 users experimenting with Copilot Chat for free, as highlighted by Directions on Microsoft analyst Mary Jo Foley.
Part of the problem is when you don’t want to touch Copilot and Microsoft shoves it in your face at every opportunity: maybe you might have given it a spin out of curiosity at some point. But like anything overly intrusive, what you develop instead is a deep rejection of the thing being forced unto you.
Let’s hope that this feeling of deep rejection comes soon and drives people to alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. People don’t have to immediately abandon all of microslop if they really don’t want to (yet), any small step is a win!
I’m definitely spreading the propaganda among some unhappy co-workers. Managed to get one to switch already and he’s not unhappy with his choice even if he needs more time to properly get used to the different UI.
BTW: OpenOffice is effectively dead.
Yeah, Oracle gave it away to Apache Foundation, but it was too late, and at that point everyone switched to LibreOffice.
LibreOffice has more users, is more actively developed. I actually thought OpenOffice already gave up as last version that I saw previously was in December 2023, but checked right now and looks like they released a new version last November. Though it is just security and bug fixes.
Yeah, Oracle gave it away to Apache Foundation, but it was too late, and at that point everyone switched to LibreOffice.
That’s probably why they gave it away: they gave up on monetizing it after all the users already left.
I tried it in VScode and writing prompts for some basic JS took longer thank just searching Stack Overflow. I am canceling the 30 day trial. Copilot is a scam.
Copilot is absolute garbage. If you want a coding LLM that badly, give Claude a spin; it’s the least bad.
The settings in Copilot allow me to choose the model and yes, Cloude was the less shit but the more I used it, the slower it got unless I started buying more tokens.
google has been trying to do it to, although on a less severe extent than MS. i think govt is thier only stable client for AI, mostly for right wing propaganda and surveillance.
I completely ignore and disable every butthole logo I see.
At least they are somewhat honest with their logos.
“Everything from this app is shit or hot air”
And of those 3,3% there’s a majority of users who just didn’t notice the auto upgrade to 365 with copilot and increase in price.
There is no metric anywhere where these numbers signal success.
It is more evidence that AI is running on 100% pure, unadulterated C-suite hopium – the kind of hopium that can only come from the people who make the most and know the least.
copilot keeps making a “copilat chat files” folder in my documents folder without my consent and I keep deleting it, and that’s enough for me to never ever want to deal with it
Make a folder with that name, take ownership, and disable write permissions for everything.
You could also make it a hidden folder if you don’t want to see it.
I will try that (if I remember). good proposal
And reality is even worse than that… I know MS probably only cares about money but, I for example, am one of those paying customers who hate Copilot and never use it, yet my employer gets it for me
I continue to provide my feedback letting them know that it’s a complete waste of money and I hope someday they will listen… but that just goes to show that even that meager 3.3% is not even composed of happy customers who find value in paying for Copilot to produce slop
Yup, I have an Enterprise seat for Copilot through work. It can be useful to slop up emails for management, but anything requiring care, accuracy or attention to detail seems outside it’s wheelhouse. As a those descriptors apply to much of my work, that Copilot license basically collects digital dust. But management is absolutely over the moon with AI, so I don’t feel bad giving them AI slop.
Write some script to constantly type bullshit into it and use up tokens xD would be funny except for boiling the oceans.
GenAI is so useful, nobody wants to pay for it!
Umm… 🤔
Hell, most people don’t even want to use it for free!
Satya Nadella described Copilot as “becoming a true daily habit,”
Kind of like the percentage of people who start biting their nails or try drinking after work make it a habit I guess: just because it’s a daily habit doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
It’s absolutely crazy that these billionaires who run the commanding tech don’t get the disconnect between public perception fueled by Hollywood and the tech they want us to use. I mean, even though it’s fun fiction…have they watched terminator, Ex Machina, 2001 Space Odyssey, etc? Yes, please give us the tech so we can kill ourselves. I mean the public perception has already baked in…but they’ve forgotten that…dayumm…what a bunch of fucktards! I knew this new CEO for MS and Apple weren’t worth a shit!
OK, lets set the stage.
I have access to ‘free’ co-pilot for home
I have access to the basic co-pilot through O365 at work
I have had access to basic Gemini through work
I have access to full-fat private ChatGPT through work
I have access to private Claude Pro through work
I have been handed edicts to find useful places for AI, prove time saving and identify issues where it’s not a good idea.
Today I ask co-pilot, in my county, what are the regulations about shoveling sidewalks on your property.
Co-Pilot: There are no regulations about that, but if you go to a nearby city there are regs and they are this.
Gemini: There are no regulations about that in your county
GPT: yes there are regs, they are here
Claude: yes there are regs, they are here, historically, they have also said this and that and here are some exclusions
Today was a good day, at least the more expensive ones had an answer.
If I ask the same question to GPT or Claude the same thing I ask to Co-Pilot, right or wrong, I’ll get a well (for a lack of better term) “thought-out” answer, It’ll give me concepts of why it answered that way and generally some citations where I can see how it came to those conclusions. Yes, in the end it’s just autocomplete, but it’s capable of giving me the context it used to complete the response. If it’s wrong, it’s easy to explain where it went off the rails and get it to change tracks and usually get a good answer.
I use Copilot for personal use because it’s free, relatively feature rich, and generally gives me faster results than whatever in the hell search engines have become. But it’s far worse than any of the other options. I think behind the scenes, they’re running models that have been pruned to hell. Where as the other guys (admittedly expensive plans) are not only giving me higher quality responses, but they run many additional queries while looking things up, is some cases you can watch the “thinking model” find out it was wrong and then backtrack and look it all up again.
There are heaps of things that it’s bad it, there are loads of things that should never be asked. But if Microsoft is intending to have people get even remotely interested in copilot, that have to make it not objectively worthless to use.
Nothing makes me want to seek out copilot less than copilot sticking its dick into everything that I am trying to do whether I wanted it or not.
Weird take. Typical playbook in SV is to push a free product to gain market dominance for a few years. Also 2% is a common paying user percentage for almost every freemium biz model, and 3%+ is actually considered pretty good
Do those freemium models usually include a $37,500,000,00 overhead?
…per quarter
Yeah… They’re lightyears away from breaking even.
You have to consider that for most servers, the marginal expenses per customer are close to negligible, that’s why you can make a profit even though only 3% of users pay you. But AI is so wasteful, that even the paying users are subsidized. Basically, the demand is not sufficient to support profitable monetization.
Weird take, because you just said a string of words which are not related to what is actually happening here. Ed Zitron has the real skinny.
The issue is there are currently hundreds of companies trying to push the exact same freemium model. And they all have very similar use cases, features, performance and user interface. So why exactly would users ever stay once the price goes up? Or are they hoping like with free games a very small number of users provides a very large revenue stream? Cause with them burning billions every month, I really don’t see that happening any time soon.
There won’t be that many of them in a few years when consolidation happens. The theory is this is a turning point in all of society, so high investment is seen as warranted. Meanwhile, the price of inference and infrastructure is going to continue to reduce, while corporate adoption will rise
Typically, the free product they push doesn’t cost them trillions of dollars.
That model works when free users are costing a couple of cents in server resources, not hundreds of dollars.
