Summary
- Microsoft Copilot only attracts 20 million users a week, failing to gain traction
- Competitor ChatGPT has 400 million weekly users, overshadowing Copilot’s growth
- Microsoft risks losing investments in AI with Copilot’s stagnation and lack of user interest
In January 2024, we saw Microsoft begin to change gears. After sitting on the sidelines in the AI war, the company began to slowly, but surely, develop its Copilot assistant into an artificial intelligence using LLM technology. Fast forward today, and Microsoft has offered us the works: Copilot Pro subscription plans, Copilot+ devices with NPU built in, and a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard. We’ve also seen the AI assistant pop up in all kinds of apps, from the Office suite to Edge.
There’s just one problem: nobody cares. Or, more accurately, not as many people care as Microsoft would like. A recent report put the general public’s Copilot usage into perspective, and if things continue, there’s a chance that the entire venture will hit a dead end soon.
Microsoft Copilot attracts “only” 20 million users a week, and it’s not going up
As reported by Newcomer, Microsoft Copilot isn’t doing as well as the company would like. The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don’t care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft’s rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:
At Microsoft’s annual executive huddle last month, the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users.
On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT’s growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI’s iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft’s best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling.
It was a sobering chart for Microsoft’s consumer AI team and the man who’s been leading it for the past year, Mustafa Suleyman.
That’s right; Microsoft Copilot’s weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it’s not increasing. It’s also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that’s now a Windows default app. This is quite scary from Microsoft’s point of view, which has put so much effort and money into its AI ventures that it really cannot afford for its business to dwindle out so soon.
It’s not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft’s CEO claiming that Copilot will become “the next Start button”, the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key. And earlier today, Intel just flat-out admitted that its AI hardware isn’t shifting. Companies have made a huge gamble on users wanting AI to rule their computers, and unfortunately, it appears that they’re about to lose it all.
