Microsoft says workers now use Copilot AI as much as they use Teams and Outlook

Workers using Microsoft software appear to be having as many conversations with Copilot AI as they do with real humans in Outlook and Teams, Microsoft said Wednesday during its conference. Fiscal year 2026 fourth quarter Earnings call.

“The number of conversations per user (Copilot) has nearly doubled year-on-year,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the call. “Average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams.”

There are more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats. The way these workers use artificial intelligence is also changing. Two months after Microsoft introduced Agent 365, a way for its business customers to build and use agent AI, it has signed up nearly 40 million agents across more than 10,000 companies, Nadella said.

“The era of agents is being built on GitHub,” Nadella said, referring to the development platform owned by Microsoft. “Every major coding proxy runs on the platform, and one in three pull requests on GitHub now includes a proxy.”

Microsoft beat investors’ expectations, posting 18% year-over-year revenue growth during the quarter, which the company attributed to artificial intelligence and cloud services. Azure revenue surpassed $100 billion for the first time ever. The company also attributed gains of $3.2 billion to Its stake in CloudMaker Anthropic. (It has been noted that Xbox’s severance and “impairment” fees are hurting the financial health of Microsoft, as its parent company 3,200 Xbox employees laid off 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. It appears that its big bet on artificial intelligence may return some money on its investments; Nadella said Copilot’s revenue increased 60% quarter-on-quarter. But spending is not slowing down; Microsoft added 31 new data centers across five continents.

The Redmond-based company has steadily and persistently integrated its AI into its software, which was already the backbone of corporate America. Adults in the United States say that help at work is one of the main reasons they use artificial intelligence, second only to searching for information, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. A recent report by the Pew Research Center.

Now, the company is betting not only that its customers will embrace AI, but that it will be so fully integrated that it will “transform” how work is done – and how success is measured.

Go beyond “time saved with AI”

In the early days of AI adoption, executives and technology enthusiasts were invested in the idea that AI technology could help employees do their work faster. Stories of AI automating repetitive processes and saving people hours of work have been common.

Now, in The era of agentic artificial intelligenceWith agents that can complete tasks autonomously, the way people use AI is changing.

Ideally, this should lead to “deeper cognitive work across the ecosystem,” Matt Firestone, general manager of product marketing at Copilot, told me.

AI workers can distinguish between when they just 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 guidance, involvement and approval.

“It’s not just about automating everything we need to do to be more efficient,” Firestone says. “It’s about improving that governance.”

Microsoft has been busy building more advanced, autonomous AI tools to help with those more complex tasks. that it Co-pilot It uses a team of agents to write reports, send messages, and perform personalized analyses, all based on your documents and messages. It’s very similar to Claude Cowork, who It sparked fear throughout Wall Street When investors saw how productive it was for software tasks when it was released in early 2025. When testing Copilot Cowork and Claude Cowork using the Microsoft 365 connector, Found Microsoft Using its Cowork tool was 30% to 40% cheaper to operate.

Microsoft has relied entirely on agentic AI. Scout, which Microsoft Calls The “perpetual personal agent” was introduced soon after in Microsoft build; It’s for your Teams and Outlook messages, flags important notes and helps you with meetings and assignments.

Having agents help with deeper cognitive work, not just answer questions, helps companies demonstrate the utility of AI – a way to expand the metrics by which we judge its success or failure. Instead of just looking at time saved, companies are now looking at how agents can enhance workflows, perform analyzes that can’t be done manually and handle specialized tasks outside of just software development.

Take Kantar, for example. The marketing data and analytics company has steadily and comprehensively integrated Copilot AI and agents into its operations over the past two years, with its HR team, not software, leading the charge. It used a 10-agent system, based on existing company policies and procedures, to handle some employee inquiries to the HR department, such as requesting and creating employment verification letters. AI has accounted for more than 40% of these types of orders since the technology was implemented, with a goal of reaching 95% by the end of the year.

HR experts’ time was saved, but AI agents also increased production, allowing human workers to focus on other projects. Applying an organizational lens to the company’s AI integration has helped the company, says John Deakin, senior director of people AI solutions.

“A lot of people I talk to think of AI tools as a technology,” Deakin says. “I think of them as a capability.” “It is a technical solution to bring capabilities to the organization in a different way, to bring new skills, new understanding, new knowledge, new methods, new intellectual design.”

For some people, this ability to take on more work means being able to tackle projects they’ve been waiting to have time to do. But for others, it means having to do more work for the same pay. This can lead to a type of AI-powered burnout, a University of California, Berkeley study I found that even with AI, we end up with longer work days and a worse work-life balance.

ROI on AI is not just a matter of talking points for companies. Companies large and small are paying big bucks to technology companies for the ability to run, license, and customize AI tools. These technology companies, in turn, are asking investors for huge sums of money to further develop the models that support chatbots and agents.

It has created a giant trillion-dollar industry, and measuring its success in multiple ways, beyond the time saved, may be vital to proving its usefulness and avoiding the bursting of the AI ​​bubble.