Although Microsoft trumpets grand successes on the artificial intelligence front, the reality behind the glossy presentations looks a little grayer. During its latest meeting with investors, the Redmond-based tech giant was quick to boast of an impressive jump in the number of users who chose the paid version of its AI assistant. Alas, if we take a closer look at the dry statistics, we will find that the revolution called Copilot is still rather stalling than flying along the highway of success.
Satya Nadella, the big boss of Microsoft, proudly announced that the company has reached a milestone of 15 million paid subscribers. This, at first glance, is a colossal growth of 160% year-on-year. Nadella even went further, claiming that artificial intelligence has already become a “real daily habit” for people. Industry analysts quickly took off their rose-colored glasses and made a simple but painful calculation: with over 450 million users of the Microsoft 365 package, the share of those who actually open their wallets for Copilot is only 3.3%.
The figure is downright startling, especially when compared to the insane investments. In the last financial quarter alone, the company poured an astronomical $37.5 billion into AI-related developments. Spending a budget the size of a medium-sized country to convince just a handful of its customers to pay sounds like a risky gamble, to say the least. It turns out that for the mass consumer, the “smart” assistant is not yet an indispensable tool, but rather a curious extra that is not worth the monthly fee.
We recall that Microsoft 365 Copilot was launched at the end of 2023 with the promise of transforming the way we work with Word, Excel and Teams. The idea was to have a personal digital secretary who would do the dirty work for us. However, the price of about $ 30 per month is clearly proving to be a stumbling block. It is obvious that for most professionals the built-in free features are quite enough and the “record momentum“ that they talk about in Redmond is currently more of a marketing buzz than a market dominance.