The numbers are in: no one is paying for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
No, not the official numbers designed by Microsoft to support their narrative. I’m talking about something that MS would prefer not to address as these numbers tell a whole different story. As a result, they are from a source that we cannot verify and therefore something that every reader needs to evaluate the trustworthiness of.
❝ “A source that has seen materials related to sales has confirmed that, as of August 2025, Microsoft has around eight million active licensed users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, amounting to a 1.81% conversion rate across the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers.” Ed Zitron: The Case Against Generative AI
I know, Ed Zitron is hardly a neutral observer of the tech industry. He is doing something that almost no one else out there bothers to do, though. Which is checking whether the numbers released by tech vendors (especially OpenAI) make any sense. This is the foundation upon which his case against the financial validity of GenAI is built on, and being a regular reader of his premium newsletter issues, I find it fairly convincing.
So, when someone on the inside wants to find a channel to bring out the inconvenient truth about AI adoption, Ed is where they would likely reach out to. These numbers that have been disclosed about Microsoft’s commercial success (failure) of selling Copilot licenses are in line with those reported about the adoption rate of other paid AI plans from other vendors.
The story can be summarized as follows:
M365 Copilot became available for enterprise customers to purchase on November 1st, 2023. That was almost 2 years ago. Now, if we assume that the adoption rate is constant, the conversion rate mentioned by Ed could grow to around 2% by the time we reach November 2025.
The 2% adoption rate in 2 years is diabolically bad. This is not just any lil’ Power Apps product that was promoted as a new tool for citizen developers to improve personal productivity. It has been the centerpiece of everything Microsoft has done and talked about for over 2 years now. I have never seen a bigger push for any MS product.
After all this — what do we even have here? 8 million active licensed users. For some tech products that might be a sizeable user base. But let’s be real here: Microsoft has at least 400,000 channel partners. If each partner org would have bought on average 20 seats of Microsoft 365 Copilot for their employees, that would already make up the 8M figure.
Indeed, most partners have to pay for the M365 Copilot seats. There are hardly any freebies available in the partner benefits packages. I pay €800 a year for MS licenses in Partner Success Core and that doesn’t give me a single M365 Copilot seat. I have to pay the full price of €337 per year to get a chance to use the premium Copilot experience in my tenant for my solopreneur Power Platform advisory business.
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