Microsoft 365 Copilot is a commercial failure

Summary

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.”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 h...