Microsoft 365 Copilot has crossed 20 million paid enterprise seats, CEO Satya Nadella told investors on Wednesday's earnings call, alongside numbers meant to rebut the persistent narrative that nobody actually uses the product. Copilot queries per user rose nearly 20% quarter over quarter, and Nadella said weekly engagement now matches Outlook — the closest thing Microsoft has to a universal daily habit inside the enterprise. Accenture also signed for more than 740,000 seats, which Nadella called Microsoft's largest Copilot win to date.
The company has quadrupled the number of customers paying for deployments above 50,000 seats. Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche each sit above 90,000 seats. Those are the kinds of footprints that turn Copilot from a line item into a standard-issue piece of office software, and they help explain why Morgan Stanley's Keith Weiss told the call the numbers were "super impressive and I think way ahead of most people's expectations."
For most of the past two years, the knock on Copilot was simple: enterprises were buying seats they weren't using. Pilots stalled. License counts looked impressive in press releases and dead in usage logs. Nadella's framing on Wednesday was a direct response to that critique — not just headcount, but engagement intensity. "This is like a daily habit of intense usage," he said.
Key facts
- 01Microsoft 365 Copilot now has more than 20 million paid enterprise seats, CEO Satya Nadella said on Wednesday's earnings call.
- 02Accenture signed for over 740,000 Copilot seats — Microsoft's largest Copilot deal to date.
- 03Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche each have more than 90,000 Copilot seats deployed.
- 04Copilot queries per user rose nearly 20% quarter over quarter, with weekly engagement matching Outlook.
- 05Agent mode became the default experience across Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint last week.
The other shift is architectural. Nadella made a point of decoupling Copilot from any single model provider, including OpenAI. "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 said. Microsoft 365 already routes to Anthropic's Claude in some cases, and the multi-model framing matters for a company that has spent the past year reorganizing its OpenAI relationship.
“Copilot queries per user were up nearly 20% quarter over quarter, and weekly engagement now sits at the same level as Outlook — a daily habit of intense usage, Nadella said.”— Jaeden Schafer
That repositioning follows the new commercial terms Microsoft and OpenAI agreed earlier this year, which give Microsoft royalty-free access to OpenAI models through 2032 — terms Nadella has said the company plans to fully exploit. Treating OpenAI as one supplier rather than the supplier is part of how Microsoft justifies the Copilot price tag to customers who don't want their AI stack chained to one lab.
Agent mode is the feature Nadella credited for the engagement uptick. "As of last week, Agent mode is now the default experience across Copilot and Word Excel and PowerPoint," he said. Microsoft made Copilot's agentic capabilities generally available the prior week, letting the assistant take multi-step actions directly inside documents rather than just summarizing or drafting. "You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot," Nadella said.
Defaulting agent mode is an aggressive product choice. It pushes every Copilot user into the more capable, more compute-hungry surface whether they asked for it or not, which is how you drive query growth — and also how you drive cost. Microsoft has not broken out Copilot gross margin, and the 20% jump in queries per user lands in the same quarter the company is leaning harder into agentic workloads.
The competitive frame matters here. Google said earlier this month it added 25 million paid subscriptions in Q1 to reach 350 million total across Workspace and consumer plans, a different mix but a comparable battle for AI seats inside productivity software. Microsoft's 20 million figure is enterprise-only and skews toward higher-priced seats, but the two companies are now openly trading engagement metrics rather than feature lists.
Skeptics still have room to push back. Microsoft did not disclose churn, did not break out paid versus bundled-in-an-E5 seats, and did not say what share of those 20 million users hit Copilot weekly versus monthly. "Engagement at the same level as Outlook" is a striking line, but Outlook has decades of email habit behind it, and matching it on weekly active use is a different bar than matching it on minutes spent. Microsoft also disclosed last week that it is offering buyouts to up to 7% of its US workforce, a reminder that even a winning AI product line is not paying for the entire cost structure yet.
Still, the trajectory is the part investors will fixate on. A year ago Copilot was the punchline of every AI-isn't-real-yet thread; this quarter it is a 20-million-seat business with a 740,000-seat anchor customer and engagement curves Microsoft is willing to compare to Outlook on a public call. If those numbers hold through the next two quarters — particularly the per-user query growth — Copilot stops being the AI feature Microsoft has to defend and starts being the one every rival has to answer. That is a meaningfully different position than the one Microsoft was in entering 2026.
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