Microsoft 365: Only 3,3% of users pay for Copilot Chat

Only 3,3% of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who use Copilot Chat pay for it. That's an embarrassing percentage that's added up alongside Microsoft's $37,5 billion quarterly AI waste and its insistence that the profits are coming.

That statistic undermines the company’s carefully crafted success story for Copilot. In its second-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call, Microsoft repeatedly touted “record” AI momentum, telling investors that it now has 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot accounts, with account growth growing more than 160% year-over-year. Satya Nadella described Copilot as “a true daily habit,” claiming that daily active users have increased tenfold year-over-year and that average conversations per user have doubled.

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What Microsoft didn't articulate is how small this paid footprint seems compared to the huge base of Microsoft 365 users who are experimenting with Copilot Chat for free, as pointed out by Directions on Microsoft analyst Mary Jo Foley.

Mary Jo Foley said Microsoft has about 450 million Microsoft 365 users, many of whom now have access to Copilot Chat at no additional cost. Ignoring bundled offers and discounts, paid Copilot users are comparatively few — an unfortunate result given the scale of Microsoft’s spending on AI.

Microsoft 365 Copilot launched in late 2023 as a $30 per user per month add-on, billed as a productivity boost that integrates directly into Word, Outlook, Teams, Excel, and PowerPoint. Since then, Microsoft has been working hard to differentiate Copilot from other chatbots, reframing it as an AI “agent” that can search documents, meetings, and emails and act on a user’s behalf. That promise — more automation, less prompting — is the future, according to Microsoft, which is keen to explain why investing in AI makes sense.

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Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.