8 ms·

Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure

198 points by jukkan 1y ago

jukkan 1y ago
8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.
- leakycap 1y ago
  Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels. I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.
  - jukkan 1y ago
    Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
    - chris_wot 1y ago
      Microsoft did this same thing with Teams and OneDrive back in the day. It took quite a while before they straightened that mess out. Not to mention ton when they renamed Lync to Skype…
      - cheeseomlit 1y ago
        And .NET Core to .NET, not to be confused with .NET Framework
        bitwize 1y ago
        .NET was always a clusterfuck of naming, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was slapping the .NET label everywhere. .NET Passport (now known as Microsoft accounts), .NET My Services, Visual Studio .NET (which was the same as regular VS, just with support for building C# and VB.NET apps added), .NET Server 2003 (Windows Server 2003), et weary cetera. In this respect, as in many others related to .NET, Microsoft was inspired by Java. In the late 90s, Java wasn't just a language, it was a VM, runtime environment, enterprise platform (Java EE, now Jakarta EE), smartcard technology, remoting protocol, operating system, desktop environment, floor wax, dessert topping...
        arielcostas 1y ago
        So Microsoft did with .NET what they now do with Copilot, right? GitHub Copilot (AI-assisted code completion and chat), Microsoft 365 Copilot (the suite), Microsoft Copilot (the chat thingy), Windows Copilot (the chat thingy, but directly on Windows), Copilot for Azure (LLM doing RAG), Copilot for Dynamics 365 (I assume something similar)...
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        Sharepoint has been a complete mess ever since its inception. It lacked any data organisation features so unless you had really strict processes and oversight it turned into a shitheap within months. This is still really the case. Even now it's mostly useful as a teams backend. But even that doesn't solve the shitheap problem, as any team you create in teams, or every yammer group automatically creates sharepoint sites which are not very useful as a sharepoint site and clutter up search results. Users often don't understand that when they share something in teams there is an actual sharepoint behind it and sometimes people fiddle with permissions there and then other people don't understand why they're not allowed to do X or Y because the controls aren't fully exposed in the Teams interface. It's such a mess.
    - dangus 1y ago
      The product naming is completely insane. In the span of a year my corporate portal changed name from portal dot office dot com, to Microsoft 365 dot com, and now its copilot something or other dot com. The portal completely changed in design and the former portal functionality is hidden in a tiny search icon in a knock off chatgpt interface. The average non-technical corporate user must be so confused.
      - ntoskrnl_exe 1y ago
        The confusing nature of product naming is I think pretty typical of MS. It’s just like with personal accounts, where there is no Outlook or Hotmail domain for logging in, it’s still live dot com, and Windows Live hasn’t been a thing for at least 13 years.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      And then they have differerent versions of copilot. The consumer one at copilot.microsoft.com, the office one at really hard to remember m365.cloud.microsoft/chat etc. It's really annoying. And it used to be better. Copilot.microsoft.com would just redirect to the best version you had access to. But they dropped that for whatever reason.
- PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
  I don't know, does it matter? What I mean is that the product only just, in the grand scheme of things, got rolled out. MS isn't under some instant pressure to make loads of cash off this new feature. Year by year, people will just become used to having a tool, part of their OS, that they can ask questions to to get some general information on whatever topic. It's easy to pick an arbitrary date and point out the lack of profit. But why don't we pick a date a year from now? Or three years. Or five years. I think over time users will come to assume that their computing device has, as part of the many tools on it, a tool that they can ask about stuff and get general answers. Is it profitable right exactly now? No. But I suspect it will become completely commonplace in a few years, and not even worthy of note or comment for the average user. MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    > MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment. Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it. I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.
- rcarmo 1y ago
  I’m pretty sure those figures aren’t global, since very few people at Microsoft have access to that kind of data outside their area of direct accountability.
leakycap 1y ago
I never understood how 365 Copilot's chat llm was so much worse than the free offerings from OpenAI at the time. Copilot is often wordy, wrong, and seems like it can't do a lot of the same things I can accomplish without logging in on ChatGPT
rgreekguy 1y ago
Yet they get big American companies to pay for this. something, something, clown world
bix6 1y ago
I had a subscription for a year and it was absolutely worthless. Has anyone found any single worthwhile use case?
- hsjdkdjdb 1y ago
  Use it like chat got ... There is no useful integration with any ms office app. Excel copilot can't edit cells, ms teams copilot cannot look meaningfully through your messages... Never tried it for other office apps...
- stevage 1y ago
  My partner uses it. Her use cases are often things like "go to all these URLs and collect some information from each one" or "collect all instances of X from these documents"
- junto 1y ago
  Yes I regularly use it for things like “I remember communicating about subject X in 2023, please find all references to that topic since that date”, and it will search and summarize all Teams, Outlook and OneDrive datapoints that I have access to in the organization and neatly summarizing it and linking directly to said datapoints. I also use it to play around with data and roughly graph it to understand trends without having to roll out a Jupyter notebook. I find it quite useful.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Yes. Worthwhile in terms of 'worth using it', not 'worth 30$ a month' though. What I like: - Meeting catch-up (I don't use meeting minutes much) - Finding stuff in my messy uncategorised mailbox - Finding stuff in sharepoint Things that were a heavy disappointment: - Everything in excel - Rewriting text (it's always too noticeable that it's AI, it should be able to learn and match my style) - Powerpoint presentation generation. It could not modify for a long time and even now it's just not useful Tbh I only use it a few times per month where it's actually useful. For other things I've tried but it needs so much explaining to get it to do exactly what I want that it's more efficient to just do it myself.
a_bonobo 1y ago
I still think there's a potential niche for 365 Copilot in its boringness. At work (not a tech company), there's an ongoing, slow, 365 rollout. The people who participate in the rollout are not technical in any way, but they all love it because they're not regular ChatGPT/Claude users, either. In a way, the restricted feature-set of Copilot compared to ChatGPT helps them, they're overwhelmed enough by Copilot. IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises, clearly defined data and risk policies. I think if they drill down into the boring, slow, predictable, they will capture the market of risk-averse non-tech companies, not people. I've tried building agents using 365 for our internal documents and they're OK for basic stuff (what's in what document where - max 20 documents only!!), but langchain/RAG/whatever are a million times more powerful.
- ares623 1y ago
  Boring doesn’t bring in the billions and billions in stock though
  - a_bonobo 1y ago
    Oh that's true. If AI is a bubble, and if it implodes, then MS might be the only AI place left standing if it can get its product into all of the non-tech companies in the world.
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      0% chance. The MIT 95% study showed that the tools are good, integration and process is the problem. There's a ton of work for people that can come into a company and set up a bespoke AI control plane/orchestration, the tooling needs to evolve a little bit so this can be a sane, repeatable business though.
      - Incipient 1y ago
        We're trying/pushing this now as a small business, and it doesn't really work. Each deployment is/would be far too niche and expensive. No one has really gotten on board, so we've mostly just been doing normal data engineering/orchestration work instead.
Bayaz 1y ago
Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.
- RachelF 1y ago
  Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better. I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?
  - calvinmorrison 1y ago
    well also it's all tied together. no shuffling contracts for slack, email, etc.
  - dripdry45 1y ago
    I mean, it worked for Oracle right?
  - gtowey 1y ago
    Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really. They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together. Who else can offer that? For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Yes, that's the thing. I see the same. Every time we had to move from a third party product to a MS one we always had to limit what we wanted to do because the MS solution was far less capable and if we asked about it we'd just get stupid answers like "why do you want to do that, we don't work that way". But they push it through the CTO with really good initial pricing, then when you're hooked they screw you on the next contract negotiation. The old saying is: "Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are". Which still rings true IMO.
tuatoru 1y ago
Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory. If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite. Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    Windows Server 2025 included many AD changes that were non-cloud related. They're not actively killing it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/whats-new-windows-server-2025#active-directory-domain-services https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
    - jiggawatts 1y ago
      Most of those are scalability / security improvements that are only relevant to fortune 500 sized megacorps. These are the kind of release notes you'd expect to see for a dying product on life support, used only by those few remaining customers that are too big and too invested in it to migrate away. Also, the Server 2025 release is the first one to change anything in Active Directory, the 2022 and 2019 versions had essentially nothing in the release notes for AD. A few performance tweaks and a long-overdue security catch-up or two in a decade is not a vibrant, living and breathing product. It's a shambling zombie.
      - p_ing 1y ago
        That's a weird take but you're entitled to it, of course; normally we see products die with zero improvements for many years. I'm well aware of the rel history of AD, but thanks for the re-education.
PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier. That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users. I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.
- chris_wot 1y ago
  That little copilot icon will sit there unused and unloved by people who will, much like with online ads, screen it out whilst they do what they actually want to do.
  - mulmen 1y ago
    Ads make money because people click on them.
    - chris_wot 1y ago
      A very tiny number of people is all you need.
  - PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
    For some, but what about the others? The reddit mentality of "everyone hates LLM AI tools" is just a very loud segment. What about everyone else? What about a random Joe who asks it questions to find some path through figuring out why their computer is acting all wonky? What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem? That is, treating it as an OS-native improvement over a search engine. The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.
dangus 1y ago
It’s garbage. My company has it, presumably by default. You ask it a simple question like “find the company holidays document” and it just can’t do it. It’s somehow not hooked up to the basic sharepoint document storage for the company. Traditional search works fine.
- Havoc 1y ago
  Implementation issue. Ours is hooked up and it’s really good at finding stuff on sharepoint, emails, chat etc
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Sharepoint is automatically integrated. So that should always work on a paid M365 copilot. But only for paid users. Free users can't have access (and also there is zero custom integration on the free version).
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Then you probably don't have the paid version. The free version ("Copilot 365 *chat*") does not have the ability to search in any company information even in M365. If you see a work and web tab at the top, click work. Then it should be able to. If you don't see this, your company is not paying and it just won't work.
mips_avatar 1y ago
I can't believe that asking copilot about a Windows issue gives me worse answers than asking chatGPT.
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  I wonder if the system prompt was written by a committee
oskarw85 1y ago
I am just a typical Office user in a small company environment. Copilot buttons started popping in various Office applications. When I asked Copilot in Outlook to summarise mails from one of my contacts it happily searched the Internet and said it found nothing. AAA experience.
brianwawok 1y ago
I bought it for 2 months. Was ok. Dumped it and pay for $30 chat gpt and $100 Claude. Covers pretty much nonstop usage between them.
neilv 1y ago
Great, funny image for the piece.
browningstreet 1y ago
I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.
- btown 1y ago
  > terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets? Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't? I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan. I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?
  - airstrike 1y ago
    I am doing exactly this. In stealth, launching soon
    - btown 1y ago
      Best of luck! Feel free to ping me, email in bio if you ever want to chat.
- samch 1y ago
  Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.
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Havoc 1y ago
Think for many people the free component is simply enough.
BenFranklin100 1y ago
The most pathetic aspect of Microsoft’s Copilot rollout is not Copilot’s poor performance & integration with SharePoint, but that Microsoft actually renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows. You’re a company whose main product has a brand recognition that ranks right up there with Coca-Cola and Apple, and you rename it after a new product that is a pile of hot garbage. Absolutely mind-boggling.
throwawa14223 1y ago
Who wants an LLM in their office suite? Of course this is a failure.
fijiaarone 1y ago
Microsoft copilot is literally just Cortana. Which they were forced to remove by users.
deleted 1y ago
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iJohnDoe 1y ago
It’s an annual commitment by default. Admins might enable it if it was monthly. However, you can’t risk one license locking you into an M365 contract. Most admins can’t and shouldn’t make that decision. Failure on Microsoft’s part for the annual requirement. Otherwise, most would toggle the license on and give it a try.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Yeah what we did for a while was just have a bunch of licenses and rotate them through the org, getting people's feedback after a month or so. Of course all the people asking for these were already very interested in AI so they are not a very representative group. We did take that into account.
mrandish 1y ago
1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently. They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
- typpilol 1y ago
  Remapping right control works fine for me on win11
  - mrandish 1y ago
    It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.
    - typpilol 1y ago
      It seems to work fine in vscode setting custom keybinds at least. I havent tried it anywhere else to be fair
ccccrrriis 1y ago
It's being shoved down our throats at work, which is really annoying. Beyond being able to search for documents, there is little utility beyond what a local <1B param LLM gives me. Even the "productivity" suggestions in teams are ridiculous - one of them is "roast me by my calendar"...wtf is that? How is that related to productivity at all?
omcnoe 1y ago
Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence. Put the LLM on answering (or at least triaging) your support tickets faster.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  > Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's Copilot doesn't run on Microsoft's own LLMs, they're all third party. ChatGPT in office copilot, in github you can choose various other ones too. Microsoft is really just a reseller there. Personally I think Claude Code (with Opus in particular) is far better. Unfortunately they are very aware of this and thus it is eyewateringly expensive.
- arielcostas 1y ago
  That's strange, my experience with GitHub and GH Copilot have been great, unlike with other Microsoft products that have their billing integrated in the Microsoft account or MS365, or Entra or whatever they call the "company accounts" today. Plus for 10$ a month (~8.50 EUR last month) I get more-than-enough-for-me access to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI models from my code editor. I wouldn't pay double for Claude Code or Cursor, so I feel like it's a good enough deal.
russellbeattie 1y ago
Since when has Microsoft had a hit product before version 3? It's simply not in their corporate DNA. Besides, I just recently saw a review of the newest Copilot for Excel by a serious spreadsheet jockey, and he was truly blown away. Basically, it knows everything Excel can do, how to do it, and it now truly understands numbers as numbers and when to use formulas, etc. etc. Basically, it went from smart automation to full on AI. If Microsoft doesn't fall for short term thinking, the product will eventually succeed.
- jukkan 1y ago
  Could have been leveraging the new Agen Mode in Excel preview released as a Labs feature. Built on Claude and not GPT-5, this is what the MS teams behind apps like Excel, PowerPoint etc. are now doubling down on. Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...
Vaslo 1y ago
My company’s security and legal are super paranoid and cannot be convinced to let us use it. So already it’s a dead deal
- Smar 1y ago
  Realists, not paranoid. The threats are very real, and even very probable at this stage.
alirath 1y ago
In my limited experience using copilot at work, i think it has been a game changer for non-technical computer users. Many of my coworkers and i use it as the first attempt at research especially now that it is connected to SharePoint within my company and provides references to the documents it is pulling from. Saves hours for things like compiling international regulations or standards documentation. Additionally, it has super charged (maybe too strong of a word) document search within our environment... Sharepoint search is the worst.
- jhickok 1y ago
  Augmenting/replacing search seems to be one of the truly useful benefits of Copilot. Not sure if that's because it's good or because Teams/Sharepoint search is so bad.
- jukkan 1y ago
  The recent Copilot search that was rolled out to replace the traditional M365 search is actually pretty good. When you use that search UI specifically. If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward. And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.
  - rcarmo 1y ago
    Depends a lot on the context of a chat, since it will prioritize the app you’re in, etc.
sexy_seedbox 1y ago
Instead of fixing critical bugs in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and rolling out actual useful features, Copilot (with limited business context) is being prioritised and poorly shoved into every aspect of the product.
vshamanovsky 1y ago
Full license of copilot is the best user experience. Love it.
typpilol 1y ago
Isn't vscode copilot the biggest market share still?
Too 1y ago
In true Microsoft spirit, they completely tanked the name. This was launched just shortly after GitHub Copilot was the hottest trend. Everyone associates Copilot with GitHub and think it's a developer-product, not an office-product. Changing the name of the entire Office suite into Copilot didn't make things better. Now you have no idea of knowing what you are really getting. Is Office Copilot? Is Copilot Office? Is Office AI? Is AI Copilot? Is time real or just a concept? Who knows? The strongest product in Microsoft's portfolio with an established name is now gone. Give it a year and it will be renamed again to Microsoft Teams 365 Copilot Enterprise with Office subsystem for Windows Business. Just to cover all bases.
- grandpoobah 1y ago
  MSN, .NET, Windows Live, Live... Microsoft can't help themselves when it comes to going all-in on new branding.
derekcheng08 1y ago
I suspect in this case, enterprise adoption of chat-based AI is downstream from consumer adoption. Like many things, trendsetting/taste-making happens on the consumer side and then comes to enterprise. ChatGPT was first to the consumer consciousness, while Claude made its mark as most tasteful... Copilot just didn't register.
bobse 1y ago
[dead]
johnnienaked 1y ago
I doubt the bleed stops there. Hell, I stopped my outlook subscription and am getting an Apple next after they shoehorned that absolute garbage into my email.
dartharva 1y ago
Anyone who's actually used Copilot won't be surprised by this. It's garbage, even the free tiers of other LLMs are better in comparison.
Simulacra 1y ago
Wow, perhaps more people feel like me: avoidance of all Microsoft products, unless forced to use them. I just don't trust Microsoft, I mean at all, and the last thing I wanna do is use copilot because it's Microsoft.
bvan 1y ago
I just want to know how I get rid of Copilot. It’s just annoying.
wkat4242 1y ago
I agree. Copilot 365 has been really underwhelming to me. It was also released way too early, half the features in excel didn't even work. That will have left a bad impression on the earliest of adopters. Which are usually the biggest advocates. But also, 30$ per month is a lot. For around 300 users you're already talking 100k per year! It's also many times the price that companies pay for their existing M365 licenses including office apps, hosting etc. So it means a completely rebudgeting of their entire IT operations. That kind of money leads to highly critical evaluations that reach the very top. They don't do much volume discount because it's all compute heavy. Another thing I've been seeing is that users who get Copilot often don't use it at all. From the users buying it, I've heard that in our org only 5-10% actively use it. Others might tap it once a month or use only one or two specific features like the teams meeting summaries. Only the most serious AI bros use it for everything. I'm in that group myself too. I use it for asking questions about meetings (like "i was distracted for a bit, what did I miss") and for finding stuff in SharePoint which always ends up being a huge mess. I don't use the email rewriting because Copilot can't match my style which makes it very obvious that I've used it which automatically leads people to devalue the message ("he didn't even bother to write it"). Something the end of this article also alludes to when it refers to an all hands email from Nadella being made with copilot. Also the pushiness of Microsoft is exhausting. Since that ignite 2022 it's's constant Copilot this Copilot that. For me that has the opposite effect. I just end up rolling my eyes when they rebrand entire product groups and keep rolling their product names. It makes it feel like they have no idea what they are doing and just scrambling to keep up. The dumbing down is also a problem. When 'researcher' was released first it would spend half an hour on my queries making really great and lengthy well-researched results. It was really powerful and comprehensive. Now all I get is a couple of minutes. It's already lost its value. I'm sure they do this to tune the compute costs but it makes the value prop even worse. I don't know where this is going but our company is not buying much of it for now. And tbh I can see why.
mmcnl 1y ago
This is a strange perspective. Indeed, no one is paying for Copilot, but no one is paying for AI in general. No one is making any profit on AI. This is not a Copilot problem, but a characteristic of the AI market in general. Only the ones who are selling shovels are making money (nVidia).
MagicMoonlight 1y ago
It costs something ridiculous like £30 per user per month. Imagine trying to justify that for 10,000 employees. It’s obscenely high for something so mediocre.
keeda 1y ago
Hmm, my first thought was, 1.81% of 440M enterprise customers after two years sure sounds bad, but I had no reference frame to compare to. That's 8 million users, which is negligible compared to ChatGPT numbers, but it is also an enterprise tool, not a consumer product. So I thought it may help to recontextualize this number to the realm of adoption of enterprise tools, maybe even specifically Microsoft enterprise tools. So I thought, maybe the Copilot GTM is probably following the same strategy as another enterprise tool that was pushed onto its existing customer base: Teams. So I went looking for data on the rate of Teams adoption. Interestingly, the sources I found suggest that Teams also had 8 million users in 2019, two years after release! https://www.demandsage.com/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statisti... Note, this was before Teams got a massive boost in early 2020 during the Covid push to remote. And for all the hate MS Teams gets, we see where it is today. So maybe this is just following the normal curve of adoption of Microsoft products. Maybe it's even doing better than Teams, considering Copilot is not free, as Teams was at launch.
iamleppert 1y ago
Sam Altman gave Nadella the most watered down version of ChatGPT he possibly could. The AI embedded into every Microsoft product I've tried has felt like at least 2 - 3 generations old than what you can get directly from OpenAI. You think it would be much better, having native access to tools and data. Nope. I could find no evidence of any of that.

198 points by jukkan 1y ago

8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.

leakycap 1y ago
Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels. I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.
- jukkan 1y ago
  Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
  - chris_wot 1y ago
    Microsoft did this same thing with Teams and OneDrive back in the day. It took quite a while before they straightened that mess out. Not to mention ton when they renamed Lync to Skype…
    - cheeseomlit 1y ago
      And .NET Core to .NET, not to be confused with .NET Framework
      - bitwize 1y ago
        .NET was always a clusterfuck of naming, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was slapping the .NET label everywhere. .NET Passport (now known as Microsoft accounts), .NET My Services, Visual Studio .NET (which was the same as regular VS, just with support for building C# and VB.NET apps added), .NET Server 2003 (Windows Server 2003), et weary cetera. In this respect, as in many others related to .NET, Microsoft was inspired by Java. In the late 90s, Java wasn't just a language, it was a VM, runtime environment, enterprise platform (Java EE, now Jakarta EE), smartcard technology, remoting protocol, operating system, desktop environment, floor wax, dessert topping...
        arielcostas 1y ago
        So Microsoft did with .NET what they now do with Copilot, right? GitHub Copilot (AI-assisted code completion and chat), Microsoft 365 Copilot (the suite), Microsoft Copilot (the chat thingy), Windows Copilot (the chat thingy, but directly on Windows), Copilot for Azure (LLM doing RAG), Copilot for Dynamics 365 (I assume something similar)...
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Sharepoint has been a complete mess ever since its inception. It lacked any data organisation features so unless you had really strict processes and oversight it turned into a shitheap within months. This is still really the case. Even now it's mostly useful as a teams backend. But even that doesn't solve the shitheap problem, as any team you create in teams, or every yammer group automatically creates sharepoint sites which are not very useful as a sharepoint site and clutter up search results. Users often don't understand that when they share something in teams there is an actual sharepoint behind it and sometimes people fiddle with permissions there and then other people don't understand why they're not allowed to do X or Y because the controls aren't fully exposed in the Teams interface. It's such a mess.
  - dangus 1y ago
    The product naming is completely insane. In the span of a year my corporate portal changed name from portal dot office dot com, to Microsoft 365 dot com, and now its copilot something or other dot com. The portal completely changed in design and the former portal functionality is hidden in a tiny search icon in a knock off chatgpt interface. The average non-technical corporate user must be so confused.
    - ntoskrnl_exe 1y ago
      The confusing nature of product naming is I think pretty typical of MS. It’s just like with personal accounts, where there is no Outlook or Hotmail domain for logging in, it’s still live dot com, and Windows Live hasn’t been a thing for at least 13 years.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    And then they have differerent versions of copilot. The consumer one at copilot.microsoft.com, the office one at really hard to remember m365.cloud.microsoft/chat etc. It's really annoying. And it used to be better. Copilot.microsoft.com would just redirect to the best version you had access to. But they dropped that for whatever reason.
PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
I don't know, does it matter? What I mean is that the product only just, in the grand scheme of things, got rolled out. MS isn't under some instant pressure to make loads of cash off this new feature. Year by year, people will just become used to having a tool, part of their OS, that they can ask questions to to get some general information on whatever topic. It's easy to pick an arbitrary date and point out the lack of profit. But why don't we pick a date a year from now? Or three years. Or five years. I think over time users will come to assume that their computing device has, as part of the many tools on it, a tool that they can ask about stuff and get general answers. Is it profitable right exactly now? No. But I suspect it will become completely commonplace in a few years, and not even worthy of note or comment for the average user. MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  > MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment. Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it. I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.
rcarmo 1y ago
I’m pretty sure those figures aren’t global, since very few people at Microsoft have access to that kind of data outside their area of direct accountability.

leakycap 1y ago

I never understood how 365 Copilot's chat llm was so much worse than the free offerings from OpenAI at the time. Copilot is often wordy, wrong, and seems like it can't do a lot of the same things I can accomplish without logging in on ChatGPT

rgreekguy 1y ago

Yet they get big American companies to pay for this. something, something, clown world

bix6 1y ago

I had a subscription for a year and it was absolutely worthless. Has anyone found any single worthwhile use case?

hsjdkdjdb 1y ago
Use it like chat got ... There is no useful integration with any ms office app. Excel copilot can't edit cells, ms teams copilot cannot look meaningfully through your messages... Never tried it for other office apps...
stevage 1y ago
My partner uses it. Her use cases are often things like "go to all these URLs and collect some information from each one" or "collect all instances of X from these documents"
junto 1y ago
Yes I regularly use it for things like “I remember communicating about subject X in 2023, please find all references to that topic since that date”, and it will search and summarize all Teams, Outlook and OneDrive datapoints that I have access to in the organization and neatly summarizing it and linking directly to said datapoints. I also use it to play around with data and roughly graph it to understand trends without having to roll out a Jupyter notebook. I find it quite useful.
wkat4242 1y ago
Yes. Worthwhile in terms of 'worth using it', not 'worth 30$ a month' though. What I like: - Meeting catch-up (I don't use meeting minutes much) - Finding stuff in my messy uncategorised mailbox - Finding stuff in sharepoint Things that were a heavy disappointment: - Everything in excel - Rewriting text (it's always too noticeable that it's AI, it should be able to learn and match my style) - Powerpoint presentation generation. It could not modify for a long time and even now it's just not useful Tbh I only use it a few times per month where it's actually useful. For other things I've tried but it needs so much explaining to get it to do exactly what I want that it's more efficient to just do it myself.

a_bonobo 1y ago

I still think there's a potential niche for 365 Copilot in its boringness. At work (not a tech company), there's an ongoing, slow, 365 rollout. The people who participate in the rollout are not technical in any way, but they all love it because they're not regular ChatGPT/Claude users, either. In a way, the restricted feature-set of Copilot compared to ChatGPT helps them, they're overwhelmed enough by Copilot. IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises, clearly defined data and risk policies. I think if they drill down into the boring, slow, predictable, they will capture the market of risk-averse non-tech companies, not people. I've tried building agents using 365 for our internal documents and they're OK for basic stuff (what's in what document where - max 20 documents only!!), but langchain/RAG/whatever are a million times more powerful.

ares623 1y ago
Boring doesn’t bring in the billions and billions in stock though
- a_bonobo 1y ago
  Oh that's true. If AI is a bubble, and if it implodes, then MS might be the only AI place left standing if it can get its product into all of the non-tech companies in the world.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    0% chance. The MIT 95% study showed that the tools are good, integration and process is the problem. There's a ton of work for people that can come into a company and set up a bespoke AI control plane/orchestration, the tooling needs to evolve a little bit so this can be a sane, repeatable business though.
    - Incipient 1y ago
      We're trying/pushing this now as a small business, and it doesn't really work. Each deployment is/would be far too niche and expensive. No one has really gotten on board, so we've mostly just been doing normal data engineering/orchestration work instead.

Bayaz 1y ago

Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.

RachelF 1y ago
Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better. I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  well also it's all tied together. no shuffling contracts for slack, email, etc.
- dripdry45 1y ago
  I mean, it worked for Oracle right?
- gtowey 1y ago
  Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really. They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together. Who else can offer that? For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Yes, that's the thing. I see the same. Every time we had to move from a third party product to a MS one we always had to limit what we wanted to do because the MS solution was far less capable and if we asked about it we'd just get stupid answers like "why do you want to do that, we don't work that way". But they push it through the CTO with really good initial pricing, then when you're hooked they screw you on the next contract negotiation. The old saying is: "Microsoft is much better at talking to your boss than you are". Which still rings true IMO.

tuatoru 1y ago

Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory. If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.

jiggawatts 1y ago
Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite. Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.
- p_ing 1y ago
  Windows Server 2025 included many AD changes that were non-cloud related. They're not actively killing it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/whats-new-windows-server-2025#active-directory-domain-services https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Most of those are scalability / security improvements that are only relevant to fortune 500 sized megacorps. These are the kind of release notes you'd expect to see for a dying product on life support, used only by those few remaining customers that are too big and too invested in it to migrate away. Also, the Server 2025 release is the first one to change anything in Active Directory, the 2022 and 2019 versions had essentially nothing in the release notes for AD. A few performance tweaks and a long-overdue security catch-up or two in a decade is not a vibrant, living and breathing product. It's a shambling zombie.
    - p_ing 1y ago
      That's a weird take but you're entitled to it, of course; normally we see products die with zero improvements for many years. I'm well aware of the rel history of AD, but thanks for the re-education.

PeterHolzwarth 1y ago

I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier. That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users. I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.

chris_wot 1y ago
That little copilot icon will sit there unused and unloved by people who will, much like with online ads, screen it out whilst they do what they actually want to do.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Ads make money because people click on them.
  - chris_wot 1y ago
    A very tiny number of people is all you need.
- PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
  For some, but what about the others? The reddit mentality of "everyone hates LLM AI tools" is just a very loud segment. What about everyone else? What about a random Joe who asks it questions to find some path through figuring out why their computer is acting all wonky? What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem? That is, treating it as an OS-native improvement over a search engine. The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.

dangus 1y ago

It’s garbage. My company has it, presumably by default. You ask it a simple question like “find the company holidays document” and it just can’t do it. It’s somehow not hooked up to the basic sharepoint document storage for the company. Traditional search works fine.

Havoc 1y ago
Implementation issue. Ours is hooked up and it’s really good at finding stuff on sharepoint, emails, chat etc
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Sharepoint is automatically integrated. So that should always work on a paid M365 copilot. But only for paid users. Free users can't have access (and also there is zero custom integration on the free version).
wkat4242 1y ago
Then you probably don't have the paid version. The free version ("Copilot 365 *chat*") does not have the ability to search in any company information even in M365. If you see a work and web tab at the top, click work. Then it should be able to. If you don't see this, your company is not paying and it just won't work.

mips_avatar 1y ago

I can't believe that asking copilot about a Windows issue gives me worse answers than asking chatGPT.

mips_avatar 1y ago
I wonder if the system prompt was written by a committee

oskarw85 1y ago

I am just a typical Office user in a small company environment. Copilot buttons started popping in various Office applications. When I asked Copilot in Outlook to summarise mails from one of my contacts it happily searched the Internet and said it found nothing. AAA experience.

brianwawok 1y ago

I bought it for 2 months. Was ok. Dumped it and pay for $30 chat gpt and $100 Claude. Covers pretty much nonstop usage between them.

neilv 1y ago

Great, funny image for the piece.

browningstreet 1y ago

I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.

btown 1y ago
> terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets? Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't? I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan. I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?
- airstrike 1y ago
  I am doing exactly this. In stealth, launching soon
  - btown 1y ago
    Best of luck! Feel free to ping me, email in bio if you ever want to chat.
samch 1y ago
Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.
- 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

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Havoc 1y ago

Think for many people the free component is simply enough.

BenFranklin100 1y ago

The most pathetic aspect of Microsoft’s Copilot rollout is not Copilot’s poor performance & integration with SharePoint, but that Microsoft actually renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows. You’re a company whose main product has a brand recognition that ranks right up there with Coca-Cola and Apple, and you rename it after a new product that is a pile of hot garbage. Absolutely mind-boggling.

throwawa14223 1y ago

Who wants an LLM in their office suite? Of course this is a failure.

fijiaarone 1y ago

Microsoft copilot is literally just Cortana. Which they were forced to remove by users.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

iJohnDoe 1y ago

It’s an annual commitment by default. Admins might enable it if it was monthly. However, you can’t risk one license locking you into an M365 contract. Most admins can’t and shouldn’t make that decision. Failure on Microsoft’s part for the annual requirement. Otherwise, most would toggle the license on and give it a try.

wkat4242 1y ago
Yeah what we did for a while was just have a bunch of licenses and rotate them through the org, getting people's feedback after a month or so. Of course all the people asking for these were already very interested in AI so they are not a very representative group. We did take that into account.

mrandish 1y ago

1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently. They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.

typpilol 1y ago
Remapping right control works fine for me on win11
- mrandish 1y ago
  It doesn't work like it did before and will fail in some contexts. For example, if you try to use it with other modifier keys (as I do), you cannot because they are ALL already pressed and those presses cannot be masked. A real modifier key can be combined with any or all of the other modifiers. There is now no way to use that key in combination with the other modifiers.
  - typpilol 1y ago
    It seems to work fine in vscode setting custom keybinds at least. I havent tried it anywhere else to be fair

ccccrrriis 1y ago

It's being shoved down our throats at work, which is really annoying. Beyond being able to search for documents, there is little utility beyond what a local <1B param LLM gives me. Even the "productivity" suggestions in teams are ridiculous - one of them is "roast me by my calendar"...wtf is that? How is that related to productivity at all?

omcnoe 1y ago

Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence. Put the LLM on answering (or at least triaging) your support tickets faster.

wkat4242 1y ago
> Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's Copilot doesn't run on Microsoft's own LLMs, they're all third party. ChatGPT in office copilot, in github you can choose various other ones too. Microsoft is really just a reseller there. Personally I think Claude Code (with Opus in particular) is far better. Unfortunately they are very aware of this and thus it is eyewateringly expensive.
arielcostas 1y ago
That's strange, my experience with GitHub and GH Copilot have been great, unlike with other Microsoft products that have their billing integrated in the Microsoft account or MS365, or Entra or whatever they call the "company accounts" today. Plus for 10$ a month (~8.50 EUR last month) I get more-than-enough-for-me access to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI models from my code editor. I wouldn't pay double for Claude Code or Cursor, so I feel like it's a good enough deal.

russellbeattie 1y ago

Since when has Microsoft had a hit product before version 3? It's simply not in their corporate DNA. Besides, I just recently saw a review of the newest Copilot for Excel by a serious spreadsheet jockey, and he was truly blown away. Basically, it knows everything Excel can do, how to do it, and it now truly understands numbers as numbers and when to use formulas, etc. etc. Basically, it went from smart automation to full on AI. If Microsoft doesn't fall for short term thinking, the product will eventually succeed.

jukkan 1y ago
Could have been leveraging the new Agen Mode in Excel preview released as a Labs feature. Built on Claude and not GPT-5, this is what the MS teams behind apps like Excel, PowerPoint etc. are now doubling down on. Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...

Vaslo 1y ago

My company’s security and legal are super paranoid and cannot be convinced to let us use it. So already it’s a dead deal

Smar 1y ago
Realists, not paranoid. The threats are very real, and even very probable at this stage.

alirath 1y ago

In my limited experience using copilot at work, i think it has been a game changer for non-technical computer users. Many of my coworkers and i use it as the first attempt at research especially now that it is connected to SharePoint within my company and provides references to the documents it is pulling from. Saves hours for things like compiling international regulations or standards documentation. Additionally, it has super charged (maybe too strong of a word) document search within our environment... Sharepoint search is the worst.

jhickok 1y ago
Augmenting/replacing search seems to be one of the truly useful benefits of Copilot. Not sure if that's because it's good or because Teams/Sharepoint search is so bad.
jukkan 1y ago
The recent Copilot search that was rolled out to replace the traditional M365 search is actually pretty good. When you use that search UI specifically. If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward. And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.
- rcarmo 1y ago
  Depends a lot on the context of a chat, since it will prioritize the app you’re in, etc.

sexy_seedbox 1y ago

Instead of fixing critical bugs in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and rolling out actual useful features, Copilot (with limited business context) is being prioritised and poorly shoved into every aspect of the product.

vshamanovsky 1y ago

Full license of copilot is the best user experience. Love it.

typpilol 1y ago

Isn't vscode copilot the biggest market share still?

Too 1y ago

In true Microsoft spirit, they completely tanked the name. This was launched just shortly after GitHub Copilot was the hottest trend. Everyone associates Copilot with GitHub and think it's a developer-product, not an office-product. Changing the name of the entire Office suite into Copilot didn't make things better. Now you have no idea of knowing what you are really getting. Is Office Copilot? Is Copilot Office? Is Office AI? Is AI Copilot? Is time real or just a concept? Who knows? The strongest product in Microsoft's portfolio with an established name is now gone. Give it a year and it will be renamed again to Microsoft Teams 365 Copilot Enterprise with Office subsystem for Windows Business. Just to cover all bases.

grandpoobah 1y ago
MSN, .NET, Windows Live, Live... Microsoft can't help themselves when it comes to going all-in on new branding.

derekcheng08 1y ago

I suspect in this case, enterprise adoption of chat-based AI is downstream from consumer adoption. Like many things, trendsetting/taste-making happens on the consumer side and then comes to enterprise. ChatGPT was first to the consumer consciousness, while Claude made its mark as most tasteful... Copilot just didn't register.

bobse 1y ago

[dead]

johnnienaked 1y ago

I doubt the bleed stops there. Hell, I stopped my outlook subscription and am getting an Apple next after they shoehorned that absolute garbage into my email.

dartharva 1y ago

Anyone who's actually used Copilot won't be surprised by this. It's garbage, even the free tiers of other LLMs are better in comparison.

Simulacra 1y ago

Wow, perhaps more people feel like me: avoidance of all Microsoft products, unless forced to use them. I just don't trust Microsoft, I mean at all, and the last thing I wanna do is use copilot because it's Microsoft.

bvan 1y ago

I just want to know how I get rid of Copilot. It’s just annoying.

wkat4242 1y ago

I agree. Copilot 365 has been really underwhelming to me. It was also released way too early, half the features in excel didn't even work. That will have left a bad impression on the earliest of adopters. Which are usually the biggest advocates. But also, 30$ per month is a lot. For around 300 users you're already talking 100k per year! It's also many times the price that companies pay for their existing M365 licenses including office apps, hosting etc. So it means a completely rebudgeting of their entire IT operations. That kind of money leads to highly critical evaluations that reach the very top. They don't do much volume discount because it's all compute heavy. Another thing I've been seeing is that users who get Copilot often don't use it at all. From the users buying it, I've heard that in our org only 5-10% actively use it. Others might tap it once a month or use only one or two specific features like the teams meeting summaries. Only the most serious AI bros use it for everything. I'm in that group myself too. I use it for asking questions about meetings (like "i was distracted for a bit, what did I miss") and for finding stuff in SharePoint which always ends up being a huge mess. I don't use the email rewriting because Copilot can't match my style which makes it very obvious that I've used it which automatically leads people to devalue the message ("he didn't even bother to write it"). Something the end of this article also alludes to when it refers to an all hands email from Nadella being made with copilot. Also the pushiness of Microsoft is exhausting. Since that ignite 2022 it's's constant Copilot this Copilot that. For me that has the opposite effect. I just end up rolling my eyes when they rebrand entire product groups and keep rolling their product names. It makes it feel like they have no idea what they are doing and just scrambling to keep up. The dumbing down is also a problem. When 'researcher' was released first it would spend half an hour on my queries making really great and lengthy well-researched results. It was really powerful and comprehensive. Now all I get is a couple of minutes. It's already lost its value. I'm sure they do this to tune the compute costs but it makes the value prop even worse. I don't know where this is going but our company is not buying much of it for now. And tbh I can see why.

mmcnl 1y ago

This is a strange perspective. Indeed, no one is paying for Copilot, but no one is paying for AI in general. No one is making any profit on AI. This is not a Copilot problem, but a characteristic of the AI market in general. Only the ones who are selling shovels are making money (nVidia).

MagicMoonlight 1y ago

It costs something ridiculous like £30 per user per month. Imagine trying to justify that for 10,000 employees. It’s obscenely high for something so mediocre.

keeda 1y ago

Hmm, my first thought was, 1.81% of 440M enterprise customers after two years sure sounds bad, but I had no reference frame to compare to. That's 8 million users, which is negligible compared to ChatGPT numbers, but it is also an enterprise tool, not a consumer product. So I thought it may help to recontextualize this number to the realm of adoption of enterprise tools, maybe even specifically Microsoft enterprise tools. So I thought, maybe the Copilot GTM is probably following the same strategy as another enterprise tool that was pushed onto its existing customer base: Teams. So I went looking for data on the rate of Teams adoption. Interestingly, the sources I found suggest that Teams also had 8 million users in 2019, two years after release! https://www.demandsage.com/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statisti... Note, this was before Teams got a massive boost in early 2020 during the Covid push to remote. And for all the hate MS Teams gets, we see where it is today. So maybe this is just following the normal curve of adoption of Microsoft products. Maybe it's even doing better than Teams, considering Copilot is not free, as Teams was at launch.

iamleppert 1y ago

Sam Altman gave Nadella the most watered down version of ChatGPT he possibly could. The AI embedded into every Microsoft product I've tried has felt like at least 2 - 3 generations old than what you can get directly from OpenAI. You think it would be much better, having native access to tools and data. Nope. I could find no evidence of any of that.