[German]Sobering figures and a "slap in the face for Microsoft". Their CoPilot, offered by Sauer-Bier, has been stuck at 20 million weekly users for a year now. OpenAI, on the other hand, can look back on increasing user numbers with ChatGPT and currently has 400 million active users per week.
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Who doesn't remember Microsoft's aggressive marketing for CoPilot? CoPilot here, CoPilot there, everybody in the Microsoft universe gets that thing pinned to its system.
I have documented three current reports from the Microsoft cosmos in the picture above. Microsoft has just released its Recall as an AI solution for CoPilot+PC as a preview (see Microsoft rolls out recall for Windows 11 24H2 on Copilot+ PCs).
Users of Windows or Microsoft 365 cannot avoid CoPilot – it is simply installed on the systems somehow – whether it is wanted or not is not asked. And sometimes Microsoft even disregards the instructions of users and administrators and activates CoPilot without being asked. There's just been a mistake, sorry, is the unofficial word from Redmond. From a "hollow gut feeling", Microsoft ranks (at least for me) in many areas in terms of "popularity in regions of the current US government".
When I look at the texts with which Microsoft strategists advertise their CoPilot solutions, it all seems "very top-heavy" to me – something you did at some point while hastily working on 30 tasks, but can no longer find, ordering a table in a restaurant, planning your next trip or summarizing a meeting. None of this (in my opinion) is something that a normal person urgently needs on a daily basis.
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A look at the figures
In the screenshot above, the article Microsoft's Big AI Hire Can't Match OpenAI catched my attention. It says that the person recently responsible for finance at Microsoft – Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Amy Hood – is said to have shown figures for CoPilot usage at Microsoft in an internal presentation. Newcomer picked up on this in an article.
The message: Microsoft's acquisitions in the AI field are not that great, and the manager Mustafa Suleyman (new Microsoft boss for Windows and Surfaces (March 2024)) poached from Google's DeepMind project has probably not brought about the turnaround.
The Newcomer article states that in March 2025, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, showed a slide at the annual Microsoft executives meeting that depicted the number of users of the Copilot consumer AI tool in 2024.
The number of users is essentially shown "as a flat line" (which runs horizontally), which is around 20 million weekly users. In other words, Microsoft can't get people excited about CoPilot.
Another line was visible on the same slide, writes Newcomer. This line shows the growth of ChatGPT in the same period. OpenAI's chatbot is on the rise and is approaching 400 million weekly users. In other words, it doesn't seem to be AI fatigue, then OpenAI is scoring with ChatGPT, while Microsoft's AI tool, as the company's biggest hope as a solution for the masses of users, is flopping.
This has been a sobering picture (of reality) for Microsoft's consumer AI team and the man who has been leading it for the past year, Mustafa Suleyman, the article says. It seems that Microsoft, with a rushed and not very useful product that was thrown onto the market, has really hit the wall. Or how do you see it? It could be that there will soon be consequences – I'm thinking of the "underperformers" mentioned in the article New evaluation system: Microsoft wants to get rid of "underperformers".
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Microsoft CoPilot (LLM & agents) will gain traction with business users.
The basic CoPilot (LLM prompt version) is included with 365 licenses, with a guarantee about data privacy. With ChatGPT you need a paid subscription for privacy.
The premium version of Copilot can use content from your documents, mails & meetings. Like creating a summary of a meeting can be very handy if Copilot does it well.
Recall is too huge a risk, I don't think it will be a success.
But remember, enterprise and public sector is always slow to adopt new technologies. It takes some time to adjust policies and guidelines.
So CoPilot will become a strong product in business & enterprise if you ask me.