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They’re so desperate to make it work.

> “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.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476045 - October 2025

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Our org has legal/security requirements around AI. MS is not making themselves available to address these concerns or giving our admins the information that is being asked for.

There are also ever changing, inscrutable licensing schemes, and too many similarly named products. It's impossible to know what to buy or how much it is going to cost.

This is even before you get to the quality of the product itself. I mean, part of the reason people aren't using it because it is hard to buy and use.

I seem to remember a similar arc with Cortana. Didn't it briefly appear everywhere in MS365?
My company has both enterprise ChatGPT and Copilot. We originally had CoPilot; we learned it can search for files on OneDrive and Emails and that is the extent of its usefulness. Because everyone was doing work on their personal ChatGPT, the company had to buy the enterprise version of ChatGPT due to risk/compliance issues. Although CoPilot supposedly runs using the same engine, it feels severely limited compared to ChatGPT.
8 million sold licenses doesn't sound like a failure to me. Why do people assume that the market for Office programs and LLM tools is the same or even comparable?
I guess teams that are clever enough to avoid Copilot are also clever enough to write a script to call it on repeat in the background, while they are doing something more useful.

Autonomous agents are all the rage anyway, isn't it?

I would tell them if only they'd ask, absolutely no issue here being the control group. Push the issue, well: Copilot can enjoy /dev/urandom
Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive"

Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity.

Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out.

Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired.

Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

For context, this is the whole list of metrics measured by their Eye of Sauron tool, Viva Insights – it seems to be split between Outlook, Teams, Office, and Copilot data. The Outlook and Teams stuff seems to relate to time spent on their individual platforms, but the Copilot-by-app stuff is hilarious.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/ref...

I look forward to the equivalent of a mouse jiggler.

Viva shows aggregate numbers and does not give any details sooo...

...ask Copilot to play a nice game of clue, checkers, tic tac toe, chess or whatever.

Adoption metric accomplished! :)

(That's what you get when you force people who don't want to use AI to use AI.)

> It will also be possible to compare an organization's percentage of active Copilot users with other companies. The numbers are calculated using randomized mathematical models, according to Microsoft, so no one company's data is used, and it isn't possible to work out who is in the benchmark against which your own company's Copilot adoption is being measured.

Somehow, I'm confident the result will almost always be that other companies are using it more.

You wouldn't have to do this with a tool that was beneficial.
Imagine such a amazing productivity tool, so amazing that you have to force your users into using it. As a person that was just born yesterday, I'm quite sure that the other technologies that are constantly compared to LLMs, like the internet and smartphones certainly must have endured the same adoption barriers, right?
Doing a mindless chore in the background to satisfy a meaningless metric sounds like the perfect task to give to an AI agent…
Microsoft adds features to its products that customers ask for. If these metrics are being included in Viva, its because companies are asking for these metrics.
This could backfire on Microsoft - if a company's leadership sees low Copilot by their employees, cancelling the subscription is an easy way for the company to save money.
Copilot got added to our Github repos. For out C++ one, I'd give it a solid 6/10
Nothing says "This tool is useful" quite like monitoring and forcing people to use it and then investigating people evading that monitoring.
Couldn't people just give the AI pointless promts/busywork to look like they're using it?
The good news is that a lot of organization will be able to realize how much their expensive subscription to Microsoft Copilot is useless and so that they can easily cut costs without affecting the productivity.