Microsoft Copilot reaches 20M paid users as Accenture deploys to entire 743,000 workforce

Microsoft says it has over 20M paid Copilot users, and they really are using it | TechCrunch

Despite the lingering perception that no one really uses Copilot, Microsoft said Wednesday that its user base and engagement are growing for the AI tool that's baked into M365 apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook email. M365 Copilot now has 20 million paid enterprise Copilot seats, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company's quarterly earnings conference call. The company has quadrupled the number of companies paying for over 50,000 seats, Nadella said, noting that Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche have more than 90,000 seats. He pointed to the deal announced earlier this week with Accenture for over 740,000 seats. "Our largest Copilot win to date," he said. Plus, he insists that people are using it, engaging with Copilot as much as they do with email. "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." He emphasized that Copilot is not dependent on any one model, like 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 supports Anthropic's Claude, for instance. In fact, Morgan Stanley's Keith Weiss said on the quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, "Those Microsoft 365 Copilot numbers are super impressive and I think way ahead of most people's expectations." Agent mode is one area that is driving usage, noting that "as of last week, Agent mode is now the default experience across Copilot and Word Excel and PowerPoint." Microsoft last week made its Copilot's agentic capabilities generally available. This allows Copilot to take multi-step actions directly in the documents. "You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot," Nadella said.

Accenture to roll out Copilot to all 743,000 employees in boost for Microsoft

April 27 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab is rolling out its Copilot 365 AI assistant to all of Accenture's roughly 743,000 employees, in the biggest enterprise deal for the chatbot as the software giant seeks to convert more of its vast customer base into paying users. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed by the companies in a joint statement on Monday. It is a major boost for Microsoft as just a little more than 3% of its over 450 million 365 enterprise users pay for the $30-a-month offering. Slow Copilot adoption and uneven cloud growth have deepened investor worries over returns from Microsoft's hefty AI outlay. Its ⁠shares are down 12% this year, after their biggest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis in January to March. The move builds on Accenture's plan in 2024 to offer Copilot to as many as 300,000 employees. The company has emerged as one of the most aggressive corporate adopters of AI, even tying top-level promotions to the technology's usage, per media reports. Charles Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's M365 apps and Copilot platform, told Reuters that efforts to offer multiple AI models, including Anthropic and tools such as "Critique" - which uses one model to check another's output - are aiding demand. Microsoft has recently pushed ⁠Anthropic's technology aggressively to customers, aiming to reduce its OpenAI reliance while tapping demand for products from the Claude creator. A reworked partnership unveiled earlier on Monday ends Microsoft's exclusive access to OpenAI's technology, clearing the way for the ChatGPT creator to sell its products across rival cloud platforms. ACCENTURE TOUTS PRODUCTIVITY GAINS FROM AI Accenture ⁠said the initial Copilot deployment has paid off. About 97% of staff said Copilot helped them complete routine tasks up to 15 times faster, while 53% reported major gains in productivity, according to a self-reported company survey of ⁠200,000 users. "Our teams are already doing higher-value work because of it," Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said. The remarks follow recent reports that have raised doubts about productivity gains from AI. A survey of nearly ⁠6,000 senior executives at U.S., UK, German and Australian firms, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February, found nearly 90% said AI had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years. Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Accenture deploys Microsoft 365 Copilot to all 743,000 employees

This is the largest enterprise AI rollout ever, as Microsoft fights to convert a 3% Copilot adoption rate. 97% of Accenture employees report Copilot helped complete routine tasks up to 15 times faster. 89% monthly active usage among the 200,000-person cohort tested. Microsoft has over 450 million M365 enterprise users; only ~3% currently pay $30/month for Copilot. Its shares are down 12% this year. Microsoft is rolling out its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant to all of Accenture's approximately 743,000 employees in what Microsoft has described as the largest enterprise Copilot deployment to date. The deal, expands a prior commitment by Accenture to deploy Copilot to 300,000 employees and extends it to the company's full global workforce across more than 120 countries. The timing is commercially significant for Microsoft: Copilot is the company's highest-profile enterprise AI product, but only around 3% of its 450 million-plus Microsoft 365 enterprise users currently pay the $30 per month Copilot premium. Microsoft shares are down approximately 12% this year as investors question whether the AI investment cycle will produce revenue growth at the expected pace. Accenture's internal usage data, shared via Microsoft's Newsroom, provides the most detailed real-world Copilot performance figures published by any enterprise at scale. Among a 200,000-employee cohort that has been using Copilot for an extended period, monthly active usage reached 89%, an adoption rate that would be considered extremely high for any enterprise software, let alone a premium AI add-on. 97% of employees said Copilot helped them complete routine tasks up to 15 times faster. 53% reported significant productivity gains. And 84% said they would miss the tool if it were removed, a metric that reflects habit formation rather than novelty. Tony Leraris, Accenture's CIO, said: "If Microsoft 365 Copilot weren't delivering real value, our people simply wouldn't be using it, our high adoption rate is what shows us that there is value." The rollout methodology is as notable as the scale. Accenture did not simply turn Copilot on for 743,000 people simultaneously. It started with a pilot of a few hundred senior leaders, scaled to 20,000 users, ran that cohort while refining data governance and access controls, then expanded in phases with a highly tailored change management programme that included one-on-one training for leaders, group sessions, and a structured internal community on Viva Engage where employees shared use cases. Leraris' framing captures the lesson: "Real value from AI investments like Copilot doesn't come from simply turning it on. It comes from investing in your people, helping them understand how to use it, how to trust it and how it fits into the way they work." That is a direct rebuke of the deployment model in which enterprises purchase AI licences and expect adoption to follow automatically. The commercial by-product of the rollout is Avanade's D3 platform, a sales intelligence tool built by the joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, which uses Copilot to aggregate proprietary internal data, industry context, and external sources into a real-time briefing for sales representatives. The research that once took days or weeks can now be produced in seconds. Avanade has rolled out D3 to 25% of its sellers; active users are generating 43% more sales opportunities than colleagues not using the tool. That figure, if it holds at scale, makes D3 one of the most commercially compelling enterprise AI use-case demonstrations published in 2026. For Microsoft, the Accenture deal addresses a specific and well-documented problem. The company has over 450 million Microsoft 365 enterprise users, by far the largest installed base of any enterprise productivity suite. Converting even a fraction of those users to the $30 per month Copilot premium would represent significant incremental revenue at near-zero marginal cost. But enterprise AI adoption has proven slower than Microsoft's initial projections: early Copilot deployments were characterised by high purchase rates but low actual usage, as employees struggled to understand where the tool added value and change management was inadequate. The Accenture rollout provides Microsoft with three commercially useful assets: a proof point for enterprise-scale adoption, a methodology blueprint for other large customers considering similar deployments, and a named reference that will be cited in every enterprise Copilot sales conversation for the next 18 months. The broader context is the revised Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, which gives Microsoft the flexibility to integrate multiple AI models into Copilot, including Anthropic's Claude, rather than being exclusively dependent on OpenAI's GPT family. Microsoft has introduced a "Critique" feature that cross-checks outputs between models to improve accuracy. That multi-model strategy both reduces dependency on any single AI provider and allows Microsoft to route different tasks to the best available model, a capability that will become increasingly important as enterprise customers ask for more granular control over which AI systems handle sensitive workloads.

Microsoft reveals how Accenture deployed Copilot to 700,000+ users at Accenture - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft reveals how Accenture deployed Copilot to 700,000+ users at Accenture Microsoft Corp. has partnered with Accenture Plc on the largest-ever deployment of its artificial intelligence tool Microsoft 365 Copilot, rolling it out to the consultancy's global workforce of more than 743,000 people - roughly equivalent to the population of Denver. The sheer scale of the rollout is truly a show of force, for Microsoft claims it has been overwhelmingly successful. It reported that 97% of Accenture's employees are now completing routine tasks up to 15 times faster than they could before, with 53% more reporting "significant improvements" in their productivity. The rollout began slowly at first, with Accenture first testing the waters in August 2023, shortly after Microsoft first launched the Copilot tool, which acts like a digital assistant that spans applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. To begin with, Accenture tested Microsoft 365 Copilot with just a few hundred of its senior leaders, before introducing it to other select employees. But within just a few months, it had already scaled the tool to around 20,000 users. Accenture' Chief Information Officer Tony Leraris said his team monitored the rollout intensively to understand exactly how those people were using Copilot, while also adapting its data strategy, data governance and access controls to facilitate its adoption. "We were fine-tuning our adoption strategy and developing a blueprint for how it would be used in daily work," he explained. Doing this was not an easy feat for a company with close to 800,000 employees globally spread across 120 countries, so the rollout progressed in phases. The company came up with a customized change management and adoption program that spanned one-on-one training sessions with senior leaders, regular communications about the latest new features, and also group training sessions on the Teams-based social networking app Viva Engage. That allowed Accenture's employees to share the new ways they were using Copilot with their colleagues. Haley Rosowsky, global Microsoft ecosystem partner marketing lead, said the ability to share how people were using Copilot encouraged others to experiment with it, fueling its adoption. "It fostered understanding and inspired people to go off and do their own experimentation and try new things," she explained. Leraris quickly realized that for such a large-scale deployment to work, the company had to customize its approach to different groups of users. "You can't take a one-size-fits-all message into adoption," he says. "We really had to demonstrate to certain people, especially leaders, how to use the tool and what the value would be specifically for them." The company then monitored its rollout to justify the decisions. In one survey of around 200,000 users, monthly active Copilot usage hit 89%, and 84% of survey respondents would "deeply miss" the tool if it disappeared. As the rollout accelerated, Accenture kept seeing encouraging feedback from across dozens of different business teams. For instance, its marketing and communications groups reportedly use Copilot as their standard way of checking new content against historic marketing materials to ensure brand consistency. They also use it to draft storyboards and create new marketing concepts. Such tasks previously could only be done with the help of specialized design teams. Accenture's sales teams also became big fans of the tool. Avanade, which is a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, developed an internal tool called D3 for making data-driven decisions. That tool uses Copilot to aggregate 8-K and 10-K reports and other data, helping salespeople to generate an average of 43% more sales opportunities, Accenture reported. More recently, Accenture's employee base has started leveraging the latest capabilities in Copilot to develop AI agents that can automate their workflows. Many of those people have no coding skills. The timing of the announcement feels like a calculated response by Microsoft to growing skepticism among investors over its AI story. While Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into AI, many investors are questioning whether or not its AI tools are providing a justifiable return on investment for early adopters. The Denver-sized deployment provides evidence that may convince other enterprises of the benefits Copilot provides. It implies that the era of AI experimentation is coming to a close -- something Google LLC Chief Executive Thomas Kurian said at last week's Cloud Next conference -- and that those who shy away from such tools will likely regret not moving fast enough to embrace them. Accenture says it's not yet done with Copilot. It sees the tool as a foundation for a complete reimagination of its professional services. It aims to become one of the world's first AI-native organizations, where every one of its employees becomes a kind of supervisor of an expanding digital workforce that gets more work done.

Accenture to roll out Copilot to all 743,000 employees in boost for Microsoft - The Economic Times

Microsoft's Copilot 365 AI assistant is now available to all Accenture employees. This is the largest enterprise deal for the chatbot. Accenture reports significant productivity gains, with staff completing routine tasks much faster. This move aims to boost Microsoft's paying user base for its AI offerings. Microsoft is rolling out its Copilot 365 AI assistant to all of Accenture's roughly 743,000 employees, in the biggest enterprise deal for the chatbot as the software giant seeks to convert more of its vast customer base into paying users. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed by the companies in a joint statement on Monday. It is a major boost for Microsoft as ⁠just ⁠a little more than 3% of its over 450 million 365 enterprise users pay for the $30-a-month offering. Slow Copilot adoption and uneven cloud growth have deepened investor worries over returns from Microsoft's hefty AI outlay. Its shares are down 12% this year, after their biggest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis in January to March. The move builds on Accenture's plan in 2024 to offer Copilot to as many as 300,000 employees. The ⁠company has emerged as one of the most aggressive corporate adopters of AI, even tying top-level promotions to the technology's usage, per media reports. Charles Lamanna, who ⁠leads Microsoft's M365 apps and Copilot platform, told Reuters that efforts to offer multiple AI models, including Anthropic and tools such as "Critique" - which uses one model to check another's output - are aiding demand. Microsoft has recently pushed Anthropic's technology aggressively to customers, aiming to reduce its OpenAI reliance while tapping demand for products from the Claude creator. A reworked partnership unveiled earlier on Monday ends Microsoft's exclusive access to OpenAI's technology, clearing the way for the ChatGPT creator to sell its products across rival cloud platforms. Accenture touts productivity gains from AI Accenture said the initial Copilot deployment has paid off. About 97% of staff said Copilot helped them complete routine tasks up ⁠to 15 times faster, while 53% reported major gains in productivity, according to a self-reported company survey of 200,000 users. "Our teams are already doing higher-value work because of it," Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said. The remarks follow recent reports that have raised doubts about productivity gains from AI. A survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives at US, UK, German and Australian firms, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February, found nearly 90% said AI had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years.

Microsoft Copilot: The Dark Horse Of Software Giant's Q3 Earnings? - Accenture (NYSE:ACN), Microsoft (NAS

Daniel Newman, CEO of Futurum Group, suggested that Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Q3 earnings may hold a surprise. Newman took to X on Tuesday to highlight CEO Satya Nadella's announcement of Copilot deployment to about 743,000 Accenture (NYSE:ACN) employees. Nadella called it the "largest" rollout of the AI-driven tool to date. The deployment began in 2023 and has since scaled with 89% monthly active usage. "MSFT Copilot Numbers may surprise this quarter?" wrote Newman. Accenture's chief information officer, Tony Leraris, describes Copilot as a "personal digital colleague". A 2025 company study of 200,000 users found 97% completed routine tasks up to 15× faster with Copilot, while 53% reported major productivity gains. Copilot Push Ahead Of Earnings Test Meanwhile, BofA Securities analyst Tal Liani said that Copilot adoption is key to validating Microsoft's AI returns, with stronger uptake expected to boost revenue per user and ease competitive pressures as Microsoft deepens integration. Copilot usage was about 15 million seats in the previous quarter, representing roughly 3.5% of Microsoft 365 users. Benzinga's Edge Rankings place Microsoft in the 93rd percentile for quality and the 75th percentile for growth, reflecting its strong performance in both areas. Benzinga's screener allows you to compare MSFT's performance with its peers. MSFT Price Action: On a year-to-date basis, the stock declined 9.24%, as per Benzinga Pro. On Tuesday, it ended 1.04% higher at $429.25. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Microsoft Copilot Reaches 20 Million Paid Seats as Enterprise Adoption Expands

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company reached 20 million paid Copilot seats within . This marked an increase of five million seats in a single quarter. The update came as part of the company's financial results, where it also reported steady demand for cloud and AI services. He noted that large-scale deployments increased during the period. The number of organizations using more than 50,000 Copilot seats rose fourfold. Companies including Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, , and Roche each surpassed 90,000 seats. Nadella also referred to a major agreement with Accenture, which involved more than 740,000 seats. Nadella described the Accenture deal as "our largest Copilot win to date." He added that enterprise demand continued to grow across industries. The figures show that adoption is expanding beyond early-stage deployments into broader organizational use.

Accenture to roll out Copilot to 743,000 employees in boost for Microsoft (April 27)

(Corrects headline and paragraph 1 of April 27 story to say Microsoft is rolling out Copilot to 743,000 Accenture employees, not all Accenture employees) April 27 (Reuters) - Microsoft is rolling out its Copilot 365 AI assistant to roughly 743,000 Accenture employees, in the biggest enterprise deal for the chatbot as the software giant seeks to convert more of its vast customer base into paying users. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed by the companies in a joint statement on Monday. It is a major boost for Microsoft as just a little more than 3% of its over 450 million 365 enterprise users pay for the $30-a-month offering. Slow Copilot adoption and uneven cloud growth have deepened investor worries over returns from Microsoft's hefty AI outlay. Its shares are down 12% this year, after their biggest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis in January to March. The move builds on Accenture's plan in 2024 to offer Copilot to as many as 300,000 employees. The company has emerged as one of the most aggressive corporate adopters of AI, even tying top-level promotions to the technology's usage, per media reports. Charles Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's M365 apps and Copilot platform, told Reuters that efforts to offer multiple AI models, including Anthropic and tools such as "Critique" - which uses one model to check another's output - are aiding demand. Microsoft has recently pushed Anthropic's technology aggressively to customers, aiming to reduce its OpenAI reliance while tapping demand for products from the Claude creator. A reworked partnership unveiled earlier on Monday ends Microsoft's exclusive access to OpenAI's technology, clearing the way for the ChatGPT creator to sell its products across rival cloud platforms. ACCENTURE TOUTS PRODUCTIVITY GAINS FROM AI Accenture said the initial Copilot deployment has paid off. About 97% of staff said Copilot helped them complete routine tasks up to 15 times faster, while 53% reported major gains in productivity, according to a self-reported company survey of 200,000 users. "Our teams are already doing higher-value work because of it," Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said. The remarks follow recent reports that have raised doubts about productivity gains from AI. A survey of nearly 6,000 senior executives at U.S., UK, German and Australian firms, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February, found nearly 90% said AI had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years. (Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)