Microsoft has spent the past few years making Copilot extraordinarily difficult to avoid. It appeared in Windows 11, and soon found its way to Edge, Word, and almost everywhere else in Microsoft’s software suite. New laptops even received a dedicated Copilot key. Microsoft wanted AI to become a daily habit, and it had hundreds of millions of existing customers to leverage.
But the latest adoption figures suggest that the distribution was quite disappointing. Microsoft revealed that Copilot 365 has more than 20 million paid seats. While that does sound impressive at a glance, this number is dwarfed when you compare the company’s more than 450 million paid commercial Microsoft 365 seats. So fewer than 4.5% of those customers pay for the full Copilot experience.
Most paid seats still gather digital dust
More interestingly, paying for Copilot does not necessarily mean employees are regularly using it. According to a new report, enterprise surveys place weekly usage among licensed Copilot seats at only 20% to 30%. Applied to Microsoft’s disclosed numbers, that leaves somewhere around 4 million to 6 million weekly users, or roughly 1% of Microsoft 365’s broader commercial customer base. This is basically just the tiniest piece of the whole pie.
Keep in mind that these figures are for the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot product, which can work across company emails, meetings, and other related systems. Meaning, they do not account for everyone using the free consumer chatbot or Copilot Chat. This is something eligible Microsoft 365 customers receive without purchasing the full license.
It shows that companies may buy thousands of seats during an AI rollout, yet only a minority of employees appear to make Copilot part of their weekly routine. Microsoft isn’t unaware of this gap and has acknowledged this. Office users are gaining the option to hide their floating Copilot button, while qualifying organizations will be able to uninstall the Windows app. The company has also scaled back Copilot branding in some inbox apps following the wider Microslop backlash.
Microsoft 365 prices went up anyway
Alongside the lukewarm adoption, the company also treated users to higher Microsoft 365 prices. At the start of this month, Microsoft increased the US monthly price of Business Basic from $6 to $7 and Business Standard from $12.50 to $14. Several enterprise and frontline plans also rose by between 5% and 33%.
The company also turned its Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Premium packages with paid Copilot into subscriptions priced at $23.50 and $32 per user each month.
