Microsoft reported on April 29, 2026, that its AI assistant Copilot now has 20 million paid enterprise seats, with user engagement growing sharply quarter over quarter. CEO Satya Nadella disclosed the figures during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call.
Nadella said Copilot queries per user rose nearly 20% quarter over quarter, with weekly engagement now matching that of Outlook. “This is like a daily habit of intense usage,” he said. The number of companies paying for more than 50,000 seats has quadrupled, with Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche each holding more than 90,000 seats. A deal announced earlier in the week with Accenture covers over 740,000 seats — what Nadella called “our largest Copilot win to date.”
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 apps including Word, Excel, and Outlook. Nadella noted the product is not tied to a single AI model, stating that users can access multiple models by default, including Anthropic’s Claude, with intelligent routing to generate optimal responses.
One driver of recent growth is Agent mode, which Microsoft made generally available last week. Now the default experience across Copilot in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Agent mode allows Copilot to take multi-step actions directly within documents. “You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot,” Nadella said.
Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss, also speaking on the earnings call, said the Copilot numbers were “super impressive” and “way ahead of most people’s expectations” — a notable signal given the persistent perception that enterprise AI tools see limited real-world adoption.
The figures suggest Microsoft’s strategy of embedding Copilot deeply into its existing productivity suite may be accelerating user uptake beyond what analysts had anticipated.
Source: TechCrunch