Satya Nadella has put a number on Copilot’s momentum at every earnings call for two years. What made Wednesday’s different was what he said about it on the call:
“The number of conversations per user nearly doubled year-over-year. Average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams.”
Seat counts and daily-user tallies describe how many licences have shipped. Weekly engagement on par with Outlook and Teams describes something closer to habit, Copilot getting opened as often as the two applications every knowledge worker already treats as switched-on-all-day infrastructure. Nadella came back to the same point later on the call, when an analyst asked him directly how usage had changed since Copilot’s early pilots. He said:
“What used to be months is days from when a license is bought.”
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The Number Microsoft Was Trying to Outrun
That comparison would have looked like wishful thinking six months ago. On the January earnings call, Nadella told investors that daily users of the Copilot app had increased nearly three times year-over-year. Weeks later, Sensor Tower data reported by CNBC put a harder number on that same product: around six million daily active users in February 2026, against 440 million for ChatGPT and 82 million for Google Gemini. Only around 3% of commercial Microsoft 365 subscribers had bought the enterprise Copilot add-on at all.
That gap, between the growth rate Nadella was describing and the scale Sensor Tower was measuring, sat behind the leadership reorganisation Microsoft announced in March. Jacob Andreou, previously Microsoft AI’s product and growth chief, was installed as EVP of Copilot, taking over consumer and commercial product lines that had until then been run separately. Mustafa Suleyman, who had led Copilot before, moved to focus on frontier model development instead. In his memo to staff, he explained the change:
“Today, we’re combining these organisations into a single, unified Copilot org.”
What’s Different Four Months On
Paid seats have doubled since April, from 15 million to more than 30 million, and net additions more than doubled again quarter-over-quarter. The more specific numbers sit underneath that headline count. The time it takes a customer to reach high usage, meaning monthly active usage above 80% across its user base, has collapsed from months to days over the past year. User satisfaction scores have doubled over the last three quarters to an all-time high, and latency fell 25% this quarter alone.
What the Comparison Still Doesn’t Prove
None of that makes the Outlook and Teams comparison a settled fact. Nadella gave no figure to go with it this time, only a relative claim, unlike the specific six-million-DAU number Sensor Tower published independently in February. Microsoft has described Copilot usage through at least three different measures inside seven months: the standalone Copilot app’s daily active users in January, an external estimate of that same app in February, and now weekly engagement on Microsoft 365 Copilot measured against Outlook and Teams. Those are not the same product or the same metric, and nothing published this week lets an outsider check the new claim the way Sensor Tower’s figure could be checked against ChatGPT and Gemini’s own reported numbers.
What has changed is that Microsoft is now making a usage-intensity argument rather than a seat-count argument, in the same quarter that the leadership reorganisation built specifically to drive adoption completed its first full run through the numbers. Whether that is cause and effect or simply good timing is something only next quarter’s figures, and whatever a third party reports in the meantime, will be able to settle.
