No One Is Using CoPilot...

CoPilot is everywhere, and… nobody wants it.

The slogan was "a PC you can talk to", but users are furious.

And now, no one is paying for it. Out of 450 million Commercial 365 seats,

those using Paid CoPilot Seats is just… 3.3%. Now, it's not just users annoyed at Microsoft.

Microsoft's market cap dropped $500 billion in a single week, after they announced more AI spend.

Yet, there's something even worse about CoPilot.

This might be Microsoft's biggest disaster in history.

Over 96% of its own Microsoft 365 customer base still isn't paying for Copilot.

And what makes this even stranger, is Microsoft's wild expectations for Copilot.

This thing is everywhere. If you're on Windows 11, click the taskbar search

button, and you'll see it in the top right. So, what is CoPilot actually for?

That was the pitch. "PC you can talk to."

Basically, Microsoft's "do stuff for me" assistant.

It would find a Windows setting for you instead of digging through menus.

Menus which Microsoft had made notoriously annoying, but I digress.

It could analyze data in Excel, or create charts and formulas,

create a presentation deck in PowerPoint based on a Word doc,

summarize and reply in Outlook, based on info in your 365 apps.

But it wasn't just 365 apps, it was integrated into Windows itself.

You could ask it to find your local files, summarize

and compare them, even the ones in OneDrive. It wasn't just your day-to-day tasks either.

A huge part of AI use is programming. You could argue that building code is the

biggest market for AI products. And Microsoft wanted in.

They already own GitHub, which they bought in 2018. The largest code hosting

and collaborating platform on earth. So, combine that with CoPilot too!

Microsoft rolled out GitHub Copilot. It's pretty much like other AI agents

that work in your editor, except instead of GPT or Claude, it was "Copilot".

Overall, some of the things Microsoft said about CoPilot sounded pretty good!

Asking an agent to pull up files, like a robust search function,

or being able to cross between all kinds of files and Windows apps at once,

sounds pretty convenient. If it actually works.

Though… Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, believed it would be much bigger.

He said it would be "essentially a new category of computing"

"This is as significant as the PC was to the '80s, the Web in the '90s, mobile in the 2000s,

cloud in the 2010s. Just like you boot up an operating system to access applications or use

a browser to navigate websites, you will involve a Copilot to do all these activities and more."

To be honest, Microsoft seemed to be going a bit crazy over CoPilot.

They pushed this thing everywhere. Microsoft rebranded the 365

app to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" The logo also changed to feature CoPilot's logo.

They also incorporated into Edge, into your taskbar, into all their

apps, even a new "CoPilot+ PC". They had also spent a lot of money.

CoPilot is based on ChatGPT models, with Microsoft tweaks.

Which they had spent $11.6 billion on. Even Bill Gates warned against,

telling Nadella "you're going to burn this billion dollars." in 2019.

But Microsoft was just getting started. In 2023 and 2024, Microsoft had a projected

$80 billion in AI infrastructure spending. By 2025, they were spending over $30 billion a

quarter, most going towards GPUs and CPUs for AI. And Nadella was confident.

Their goal was enterprise customers. Giant businesses who would buy hundreds,

if not thousands of seats. CoPilot was $30 per seat, per month.

And Microsoft has hundreds of millions of 365 seats.

Just imagine the revenue if even half of them adopt CoPilot.

But Microsoft had to prove it was worth it for them.

So they hired Forrester Consulting to conduct a study on CoPilot.

They estimated businesses would see a return on investment between 137% and 367%.

CoPilot would also, apparently, improve efficiency by 6-13%, worth between $5

million and $9.6 million over 3 years. For small to medium businesses,

Forrester projected a 6% increase in revenue, 20% lower operating costs, and 25% faster new

hire onboarding. Sounds great!…

If it actually works…. ….so did it?

At first, it looked like good news. 94% of organizations using Microsoft

365 Copilot reported some benefits! And 70% of Fortune 500 companies have

"adopted" 365 Copilot. Also great!

But, there was a huge problem… for Microsoft specifically.

Only 6% completed an enterprise-wide rollout, and 72% were still in pilot or limited deployments.

Not good.

But what about the metrics? Return on investment as high as 360%?

Also underwhelming. So why roll out Copilot company-wide? It just wasn't worth it.

Those Fortune 500 companies were mostly just using pilots, aka,

the limited trial rollout, to a small group. But Microsoft wanted everyone using Copilot.

After Microsoft pushed it so aggressively,

many people did give it a go. But results were mixed.

Soon, complaints, comments, and angry reviews began to pour into support sites.

"give me a list of all the files I have opened today showing the filename,

time it was accessed, and filesize. Not only will it NOT place the content

into my open word doc, but it can't even get the contents of the file correct. It

starts listing a useless list of files literally opened YEARS ago.

It will give me instructions on how to do things myself and is thus just a conventional

help system on steroids. Copilot has been a NEGATIVE productivity boost"

"I find it very frustrating that Copilot won't do anything to my documents - it just gives me

complicated instructions on how to do it myself. For example I asked it to change

the font of all dates in my Word document from ordinary to bold: the reply told me how

to do it, (it wasn't straightforward)" And, these aren’t just horror stories.

Every time I've used Copilot personally, it doesn't really do anything.

It sort of sits there, and whenever I ask it to do something, it gives an

excuse why it can't, and tells me to do it! If you didn't like Copilot, too bad. You

couldn't get rid of it from OneNote, Excel, or PowerPoint, and in some cases, Windows itself.

"Literally no one asked for all this AI. In fact, everyone wants to know how to remove it"

This is while Microsoft simultaneously makes Windows 11 more bloated

But, it gets even worse. To date, Microsoft has

committed over 13 billion into ChatGPT, which is essentially the engine for Copilot.

Though, for a long time Copilot didn't use OpenAI's latest LLM, and instead used models like

GPT-4, with a bunch of Microsoft's changes. But, despite all this investment,

Copilot is just a worse ChatGPT, which has caused something ironic to happen.

Its users are just using ChatGPT instead: Resolution / Payoff

Grok just works. ChatGPT just works. Claude just works. Copilot is a dumpster fire.

"When you ask ChatGPT to perform a specific function, it does so without hesitation.

It's able to understand the request and deliver exactly what's needed. But Copilot? It struggles

with the basics, and that's unacceptable, especially from a company like Microsoft."

According to user data, "ChatGPT rates 97% for ease of use and 93% for meeting requirements,

while Copilot scores 86%." To be honest, 86% is not bad,

but you see the relative problem. Copilot fails at the very thing it's intended for.

Microsoft's own employees are paying out of pocket for ChatGPT, instead of Copilot.

The Copilot adoption wasn't working, so Microsoft decided to change tactics.

Windows might feel like it's getting worse every year, but our videos are still

consistent after 8 years. So if you haven't subscribed, it would mean a lot. Thank you.

Microsoft's metrics were falling way below the benchmark.

Only 1 in 5 salespeople hit their AI sales targets,

which caused Microsoft to lower the goals. For Business 365 customers, out of the 450 million

seats, only 3% had paid for Copilot seats… So Microsoft pivoted to another group:

Personal and family plans. Satya Nadella was going to get everyone to become

Copilot users, whether they liked it or not. Tension

In late 2024, Microsoft made changes to the Personal and Family 365 plans.

These would now include Microsoft Copilot. Except, there was a twist.

Microsoft was quietly moving people onto a higher priced tier to include Copilot.

The personal plan by 45%, and the family plan by 29%.

But, what if you wanted the original plan? Microsoft wouldn't tell you.

The "Classic" version of 365 only appeared if you went to the "cancel subscription" path.

And in Australia and New Zealand, you can't even swap back to classic anymore.

This was so bad that the Australian Government sued Microsoft for pushing customers into higher

priced plans, for a penalty above $50 million AUD. Instead of trying to get everyone to buy into

Copilot, they'd just force it into the product everyone was using.

Speaking of which, I also think this is why Microsoft discontinued Windows 10 notably

early. The built-in Copilot outside of the browser is only available in Windows 11,

and I think they wanted more of their users using their new big product.

Ironically, for a lot of people, this was a pretty big reason to stick with Windows 10.

People were sick of Copilot. It was now dragging the

rest of Windows down with it. Users gave Microsoft a new name: Microslop.

Someone even made a browser addon that does this. Pretty funny.

People are also now calling Copilot Clippy 2.0. Among other things.

But there's still one unanswered question. What about Copilot for GitHub? And being

the "future of coding?" This might be the ironic

twist in this whole story, because… not even Microsoft trusts Copilot to do this?

Microsoft recently asked "thousands of its software engineers to work with

both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot—and report back on which one works better"

These are staff responsible for Windows, Office, Teams, Edge, and Surface,

who were all instructed to use Claude. Even non-technical employees like designers

and project managers were told to use it. Microsoft also made a deal with Anthropic

so Microsoft Foundry customers, their Azure AI agent platform, can access all the Claude agents:

Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5. But if Microsoft says Copilot is the future

of coding, why use other platforms? Well, we know why.

The reality is, many developers use lots of agents, not just one.

Cursor for changing code across complex multi-file projects, or Claude Code

for making simple edits many times. Copilot does have some unique uses.

Some developers will use GitHub Copilot inside JetBrains, a coding app, because when adding

code in-line as you type it, as well as some other uses, it's actually fantastic.

But Microsoft didn't want Copilot to be one of the niche but useful coding agents.

The big money maker for Microsoft is enterprise. Those hundreds of millions of paid seats.

And that's exactly where Copilot is falling short.

Satya Nadella wanted it to be, essentially, the next Windows, more or less.

But deep down, I think Microsoft knows Copilot is a stumbling block.

It's just a worse ChatGPT, which itself is in trouble with Google's recent success with Gemini.

And now, it seems like Microsoft is finally starting to pull back Copilot. In fact,

it looks like CEOs in general are pulling back from AI. Check out this video to learn more.