Despite lingering skepticism that Copilot isn’t widely adopted, Microsoft reported on Wednesday that both its user base and engagement levels are rising for the AI assistant integrated into M365 applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. CEO Satya Nadella announced during the company’s quarterly earnings call that M365 Copilot now serves 20 million paid enterprise seats. He also noted that the number of businesses purchasing over 50,000 seats has quadrupled, with companies like Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche each holding more than 90,000 seats. Nadella highlighted a deal announced earlier this week with Accenture, which secured over 740,000 seats—calling it “our largest Copilot win to date.” He further emphasized that people are actively using the tool, with engagement levels comparable to email usage. “Copilot queries per user were up nearly 20% quarter over quarter. To put this momentum in perspective, weekly engagement is now at the same level as Outlook,” he said. “This is like a daily habit of intense usage.”

Nadella stressed that Copilot’s functionality isn’t tied to any single model, such as OpenAI’s. “You now have access in chat to multiple models by default, with intelligent auto routing in agents with critique and counsel, you can use multiple models together to generate optimal responses,” he explained. For instance, Microsoft 365 supports Anthropic’s Claude. Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss remarked during the earnings call, “Those Microsoft 365 Copilot numbers are super impressive and I think way ahead of most people’s expectations.”

Agent mode is a key driver of usage, Nadella noted, adding that “as of last week, Agent mode is now the default experience across Copilot and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.” Last week, Microsoft made Copilot’s agentic capabilities generally available, enabling it to perform multi-step actions directly within documents. “You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot,” Nadella said.