30 million pay for Microsoft Copilot, but do they use it?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant built into Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams that can write drafts, summarize emails or create spreadsheets from ordinary sentences. This summer, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the service has now passed 30 million paid licenses, a doubling of quarterly growth compared with before.

At a list price of about $30 (about DKK 210) per user per month, 30 million licenses correspond to theoretical annual revenue of $10.8 billion if everyone pays full price. However, that is only the list price, and many companies negotiate discounts, so the real figure is lower.

Compared with Microsoft's total customer base, the picture is more modest. Out of about 464 million business licenses for Microsoft 365, only about 6.5 percent have also bought Copilot. Large customers such as the British health service NHS England, the accounting firm KPMG and the bank HSBC have adopted the tool on a large scale, and Microsoft points to rising satisfaction among users.

But there are also critical voices. Independent analyses have estimated that even among the companies that pay for Copilot, only a minority of employees actually use it weekly, possibly as little as 1 percent of the total number of Microsoft users. Internally at Microsoft, a memo from one of the top executives is said to have circulated, stating that Copilot must "earn its right to exist," and Microsoft has since shut down several rarely used Copilot features.

For ordinary companies and employees, this means Copilot is growing fast in the number of licenses sold, but it is far from given that you automatically save time or money just because you have access to it. Whether the investment is worth the money depends largely on whether employees actually use the tool in their daily work.