The numbers are in: no one is paying for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

No, not the official numbers designed by Microsoft to support their narrative. I’m talking about something that MS would prefer not to address as these numbers tell a whole different story. As a result, they are from a source that we cannot verify and therefore something that every reader needs to evaluate the trustworthiness of.

I know, Ed Zitron is hardly a neutral observer of the tech industry. He is doing something that almost no one else out there bothers to do, though. Which is checking whether the numbers released by tech vendors (especially OpenAI) make any sense. This is the foundation upon which his case against the financial validity of GenAI is built on, and being a regular reader of his premium newsletter issues, I find it fairly convincing.

So, when someone on the inside wants to find a channel to bring out the inconvenient truth about AI adoption, Ed is where they would likely reach out to. These numbers that have been disclosed about Microsoft’s commercial success (failure) of selling Copilot licenses are in line with those reported about the adoption rate of other paid AI plans from other vendors.

The story can be summarized as follows:

M365 Copilot became available for enterprise customers to purchase on November 1st, 2023. That was almost 2 years ago. Now, if we assume that the adoption rate is constant, the conversion rate mentioned by Ed could grow to around 2% by the time we reach November 2025.

The 2% adoption rate in 2 years is diabolically bad. This is not just any lil’ Power Apps product that was promoted as a new tool for citizen developers to improve personal productivity. It has been the centerpiece of everything Microsoft has done and talked about for over 2 years now. I have never seen a bigger push for any MS product.

After all this — what do we even have here? 8 million active licensed users. For some tech products that might be a sizeable user base. But let’s be real here: Microsoft has at least 400,000 channel partners. If each partner org would have bought on average 20 seats of Microsoft 365 Copilot for their employees, that would already make up the 8M figure.

Indeed, most partners have to pay for the M365 Copilot seats. There are hardly any freebies available in the partner benefits packages. I pay €800 a year for MS licenses in Partner Success Core and that doesn’t give me a single M365 Copilot seat. I have to pay the full price of €337 per year to get a chance to use the premium Copilot experience in my tenant for my solopreneur Power Platform advisory business.

This, of course, makes it easier to evaluate whether I get value from the license or not. While I acknowledge that I’m not the typical user persona for M365 Copilot, it has given me just a fraction of the value that my ChatGPT Plus subscription does. At a lower price point. Since I don’t have to sell and promote this product to customers, like many MS partners do, I’m free to tell everyone about this experience. As I’ve done in this newsletter for the past year on many, many occasions.

It could have been just me who’s a cranky old CRM consultant shouting at the AI cloud. Well, based on these adoption numbers for Microsoft 365 Copilot, I’m not in the minority. The vast majority of people out there who use Microsoft cloud tools don’t see Copilot as giving them enough value to justify the $30 per month cost.

Remember: even though these aren’t individual users buying things for themselves, we’re not talking about just another MS license. This is AI! It’s the thing that’s “no longer optional” at so many companies — thanks to all the AI CEOs forcing their employees to adopt it or else. We read about these initiatives from media of how business leaders want to transform their company via AI on a daily basis.

There must be loads of companies who have gone and ticked the AI box by choosing to purchase M365 Copilot licenses. And despite all this blind support from management, this is as far as Microsoft has gotten with the paid Copilot product sales.

Another interesting figure from Ed’s newsletter was about SharePoint agents:

Hmm, let’s see now. What other numbers do we have of agents that we could compare this with? Oh, right! The 3 million agents in FY25 story. Let’s revisit a screenshot I shared in my Numbers designed to please article a couple of months ago:

My theory (as well as Suhail’s) was that most of the 3M agents would be in SharePoint, and they wouldn’t be in production use. Weekly usage could well be considered a threshold for an AI agent being in production, so that would give us 10% when comparing it to the 300k figure in Ed’s newsletter.

But that was about users. Unlike Copilot, which is supposed to be a personal AI assistant, agents are meant to be tools that many individuals tap into with their Copilot. Now, let’s ignore for a moment the crazy fact that you can’t use SharePoint agents in the Microsoft 365 Copilot UI. Out of the 300 million users of SharePoint Online (I don’t know why Ed said only 250M), 0.1% of them interacted with an agent during a week in August 2025. One user out of a thousand.

Can you feel the AI transformation already?

If this were a normal software product, the industry would have moved on already and invented something else to pitch to customers. In practice, it is anything but normal. GenAI is the only story left for Big Tech to tell when chasing for ever greater growth percentages. And yet the only thing growing are the capex investments.