Microsoft Says Workers Are Now Using Copilot AI as Much as Teams and Outlook

Workers who use Microsoft software seem to be having as many conversations with Copilot AI as with real humans in Outlook and Teams, Microsoft said Wednesday during its fiscal year 2026 fourth-quarter earnings call.  “The number of conversations per [Copilot] user nearly doubled year over year,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the call. “Average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams.”  There are over 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats. And the way these workers are using AI is changing, too. Two months after Microsoft introduced Agent 365, a way for its business customers to build and use agentic AI, it has registered nearly 40 million agents across more than 10,000 companies, Nadella said.  “The agentic era is being built on GitHub,” Nadella said, referring to the developer platform Microsoft owns. “Every major coding agent runs on the platform, and one in three pull requests on GitHub now involves an agent.”  Microsoft beat investor expectations, reporting 18% revenue growth year-over-year for the quarter, which the company attributed to its AI and cloud services. Azure surpassed $100 billion in revenue for the first time ever. The company also attributed a $3.2 billion gain to its stake in Claude maker Anthropic. (Xbox severance and “impairment” charges were noted as hurting Microsoft’s financial health, as the parent company laid off 3,200 Xbox employees earlier this month, but that didn’t stop Microsoft from reporting just over $35 billion in net income.) Like every other tech company, Microsoft has invested significant money and manpower behind its AI system, Copilot. And it seems its expensive bet on AI is possibly returning some cash on its investment; Nadella said Copilot revenue increased 60% quarter-over-quarter. But the spending isn’t slowing down; Microsoft added 31 new data centers across five continents. The Redmond-based company has steadily and insistently integrated its AI into its software, which was already the backbone of corporate America. US adults say help with work is one of the main reasons they use AI, second only to searching for information, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Now, the company is betting not only that its customers will adopt AI, but that it will be so thoroughly integrated that it “transforms” how work is done – and how success is measured.  Moving past ‘time saved with AI’ In the early days of AI adoption, executives and tech enthusiasts were invested in the idea that AI tech could help employees do their work faster. Stories of AI automating repetitive processes and saving people hours of work were common.  Now, in the age of agentic AI, with agents that can autonomously complete tasks, the way people are using AI is changing.  Ideally, this should lead to “deeper cognitive work across the ecosystem,” Matt Firestone, general manager of product marketing for Copilot, tells me.  AI-native workers can distinguish between when they only need a quick answer from AI and when they need to use more advanced models or tools to handle more complex tasks, where there is also more human direction, engagement and approval. “It’s not just about automating everything that we need to do to be more efficient. It’s about developing that judgment,” says Firestone.  And Microsoft has been busy building these more advanced, autonomous AI tools to help with those more complex assignments. Its Copilot Cowork uses a team of agents to write reports, send messages and do personalized analysis, all of which is grounded in your documents and messages. It’s very similar to Claude Cowork, which sparked fear across Wall Street when investors saw how productive it is at software tasks when it was released at the beginning of 2025. When testing Copilot Cowork and Claude Cowork with a Microsoft 365 connector, Microsoft found that using its own Cowork tool was on average 30% to 40% cheaper to run. Microsoft has lean