Microsoft's Copilot Struggles to Compete with ChatGPT Despite Massive Investment

OpenAI Is Eating Microsoft's Lunch

Microsoft has somehow managed to have another Cortana moment. Despite its AI assistant, Copilot, being built into Windows machines and compatible with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that millions of people are stuck with, it simply cannot get people to love the in-house option. According to a new report, ChatGPT has managed to rack up about 10 times the downloads that Microsoft's Copilot has received. Bloomberg cites data provided by Sensor Tower that found the Copilot app for iOS and Android has been downloaded about 79 million times, which, to be fair, is a pretty solid install base. The problem is that ChatGPT has already surpassed 900 million. You don't have to ask a chatbot which number is bigger. There's no shame in getting beat, but Microsoft had a pretty major head start getting people to adopt its products, and they just...didn't. Because the company has a partnership with OpenAI, it was early to the AI assistant game, launching Copilot before Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Meta AI, or DeepSeek got going. Despite that, Copilot sits in fourth place when it comes to total installations. It trails not only ChatGPT, but Gemini and DeepSeek. In part, Copilot's lagging popularity is a result of mismanagement on the part of Microsoft. Bloomberg highlights how the company chose to split the AI assistant into two, creating a work and personal version. Doing so led to people who were using Copilot as their default assistant on Android devices losing access to the AI's functionality as the company rebuilt the product from the ground up. Things are even worse on desktop where, for some ungodly reason, Copilot can’t access basic system-level controls like increasing or decreasing the volume or opening an app like Outlookâ€"things that "dumb" smart assistants like Siri had the capability of doing a decade ago. Somehow, this just keeps happening to Microsoft. The company that was once found guilty of operating a monopoly by favoring its Internet Explorer web browser over alternatives has not been able to use the same playbook to find success since. The smart assistant Cortana, Copilot's predecessor, failed to gain the relevance of Siri or Alexa despite having a massive install base because of its positioning in the Windows OS. Bing has the benefit of being the default search engine on Windows devices and was the first search engine to integrate AI results, and yet its market share has barely ticked upward at all. It seems no matter what, Microsoft just cannot make people love its products. Perhaps it could try making better ones and see how that goes.

ChatGPT beats Microsoft's Copilot by millions of downloads

Microsoft has thrown billions of dollars into AI to quickly advance in the world's AI chatbot race, yet it's still falling far behind its competitors. The tech company's AI chatbot Copilot has 79 million downloads, but its numbers pale in comparison to its main competitors. ChatGPT, on the other hand, has exceeded 900 million downloads, garnering 10x more downloads than Microsoft, according to Bloomberg reporting based on data from Sensor Tower. Next in line is Google's Gemini with 200 million downloads, then DeepSeek with 127 million, and then Microsoft's Copilot takes fourth place, the report said. Although Copilot's downloads are ahead of some other chatbots, like Perplexity, it's struggling by millions in comparison to DeepSeek and Gemini, and is miles behind ChatGPT, according to the report. ChatGPT's popularity among users compared to Copilot's really comes as no surprise -- users have been saying Microsoft's chatbot's AI isn't as good as ChatGPT's since last year. Microsoft President Brad Smith had previously said in a blog post that the tech giant was on track to invest $80 billion in AI-enabled data centers in fiscal year 2025 (which ended on June 30). Plus, the company is handing out eye-popping salaries and retention bonuses to employees working on artificial intelligence -- especially those advancing Copilot and its broader generative AI strategy. In April, Microsoft announced an array of updates to personalize and automate its AI assistant at the company's 50th anniversary celebrations. "Ultimately, I think there is going to be as many Copilots as there are people using them," Microsoft's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said from the event at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. "Each is going to have its own style and tone and, of course, its own name. And so today, we're taking the very first steps towards rich memory and personalization, the very foundations of an AI companion." The capabilities announced, while new to Copilot, aren't particularly new to the industry. ChatGPT already offers personalization. Microsoft currently uses models from OpenAI -- which owns ChatGPT -- in part to power its AI chatbot. Microsoft is clearly counting on its AI strategy paying off, but billions invested in infrastructure and high-paying salaries might not be enough for the tech company to catch up to ChatGPT's success. -- Britney Nguyen, Ece Yildirim, and Emily Price contributed to this article.

Microsoft's Copilot challenge: 900 million ChatGPT downloads

(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. has spent billions of dollars to get people like Tyson Jominy using its Copilot, an artificially intelligent personal assistant designed to make it easier for consumers to navigate the world. But when Copilot pops up on Jominy's computer screen, it's typically an accident -- the result of a mistaken push of what used to be a control key. He would much rather use ChatGPT on his smartphone, or Grok, which helps him make sense of the rapid-fire stream of posts on X. Jominy, who manages teams working in data and analytics, has used Copilot at work, but he has no interest in using it off the clock. Jominy has a lot of company. While the Copilot smartphone app has been downloaded 79 million times, according to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT, the pioneering chatbot created by Microsoft partner OpenAI, recently surpassed 900 million downloads. Despite spending heavily on artificial intelligence and associated infrastructure over the past couple of years, the world's largest software maker is struggling to make headway against ChatGPT and a host of other AI assistants. Microsoft shares have surged about 20% so far this year, based largely on Wall Street's expectations that the company's AI bet will help secure its future, but some investors are starting to get impatient. "They have to win this," said Gil Luria, an analyst with D.A. Davidson. "If they don't, someone else will." Microsoft is staking its future on three Copilot-branded products: a coding assistant for developers, a workplace helper embedded in the likes of Outlook and Word, and a personal assistant built to help people like Jominy navigate and understand the world. At an all-hands meeting in May, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella told employees the goal is to get hundreds of millions of people using Microsoft's family of AI apps, Bloomberg previously reported. The company started baking AI into its products two years ago. The Bing search engine was restyled as an AI companion for the web. Windows users were told to get ready for a chatbot that would "personalize and navigate your PC." But behind the scenes, engineers were struggling to create the new world executives were pushing for. They had access to the same raw material -- the large language models built by OpenAI -- but mostly came up with slightly different spins on how chatbots might improve the lives of users searching the web or writing an email. Whatever advantage Microsoft had thanks to its close ties with OpenAI wasn't translating into hoped-for market share gains in products like Bing. Nadella eventually tired of the halting progress, and recruited Mustafa Suleyman 15 months ago to run Microsoft's consumer AI operation. Depending on who you talk to, Suleyman was either an inspired or risky hire. A British founder of two well-regarded AI startups, DeepMind and Inflection, he's widely considered a brilliant recruiter and motivator of engineers. He also acknowledged missteps while managing large teams at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, including setting "pretty unreasonable expectations." Besides leading the teams working on the consumer-focused Copilot, he's responsible for a bunch of existing products -- the Edge browser, the MSN news and web landing page, Bing search -- that boast millions of users but little cultural cachet. Suleyman tends to wax philosophical on the subject of artificial intelligence -- thinking aloud in LinkedIn posts and frequent podcast appearances on what it means to be human and the nature of computer intelligence. Translated, he's essentially saying that he wants to build AI assistants that keep humans in the loop and help better themselves. He professes zero desire to create machines smarter than people for the sake of a milestone. Artificial general intelligence "is not our mission," Suleyman said in an interview earlier this year. "Products are our mission, and we are singularly focused on: Is it useful? Does it help? Is it supportive? Am I happy?" More: Microsoft's CEO on How AI Will Remake Every Company, Including His Shortly after his arrival, Suleyman split the software that powers the consumer edition of Copilot from the workplace version, reflecting a belief -- informed by Microsoft's enormous roster of corporate clients -- that people will end up using distinct AI tools depending on whether they're at work or home. A personal chatbot might need to be able to hop among shopping apps or counsel someone who's experienced a death in the family, capabilities that aren't on the wish list of office workers toiling in Excel. Suleyman's consumer Copilot, though developed atop the same AI models as its corporate cousin, was rebuilt from the ground up. It was a rocky transition. People who used Copilot as their default Android smartphone assistant, summoning it with the push of a button, lost that ability, meaning they'd have to use the app to interact with the software. App stores lit up with reviews from frustrated users who watched features like the ability to quickly edit AI-generated images disappear overnight. The company has reintroduced some features, but complaints of bugs -- sudden ends to conversations, or cases where Copilot wiped conversations it was supposed to recall -- persist. Watching Microsoft's Copilot commercials, it's easy to imagine a range of basic things a Windows AI assistant could do -- from setting up appointments to identifying which programs are draining the battery. After all, Microsoft created a similar roadmap a decade ago with its Cortana voice assistant. In 2015, Cortana could drop into your calendar to find time for an appointment, compose an email, or set a reminder designed to go off when the user arrived at a certain place. But the Copilot app installed on Windows laptops can't even increase the volume or open Outlook. Suleyman has said AI will eventually remake graphical interfaces like Windows. But for now, Microsoft executives are wary of alienating users by forcing them to learn new habits and tend to bolt AI innovations onto existing tools. When the company started rolling out an AI agent to help manage PCs last month, it wound up in Settings, not the Copilot app. There are technical challenges, too. The operating system only gets a few major updates a year and isn't set up to receive frequent tweaks of the sort the Copilot team are rolling out. "That's our big challenge," Suleyman said. "There's a kind of annual rhythm to it, and there's also just a lot of degrees of freedom that are restricted." So by default, Copilot is a smartphone app. That's a problem because Alphabet Inc.'s Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS power virtually all of the world's mobile devices. Both are also weaving their own artificial intelligence tools into their mobile operating systems. There's no precedent for Microsoft building a must-have smartphone app from scratch. "It's incredibly difficult, especially when the owners of those devices are trying to do the same thing," said Matthew Quinlan, a former Microsoft manager who tried, with little luck, to get people using a Cortana smartphone app a decade ago. The Copilot app is a work in progress. The chatbot was recently given the capability to recall things users have brought up -- dietary preferences, say, or details about family members. But the results are uneven, and the software has a tendency to use its newfound memory to bring up irrelevant facts to keep a conversation going. Copilot can be a savvy shopping guide, though it has a habit of sending users to dead links. And like all chatbots, it's beholden to an imperfect set of information (much of it sourced from Bing's web crawlers), making it prone to confidently reciting outdated news or flubbing a weather forecast. Ask Copilot where to buy a travel charger, and it might display a map of nearby electric vehicle charging stations. In an effort to improve Copilot, Suleyman brought over the six-week product sprints he used at Inflection. At the end of the six weeks, and in periodic stops in between, employees are expected to candidly assess their progress. "I'm trying to get people into experimentation, risk-taking, being open about their hypotheses, not owning that personally as their pet project, but just being ruthless about experimentation," he said. Microsoft's struggles with its consumer Copilot echo the challenges the company is experiencing with the version it created for corporations. Bloomberg has reported that many office workers prefer ChatGPT, and have been pressuring their bosses to let them use it. Some companies are testing both Copilot and ChatGPT and awaiting employee feedback before deciding whether to use one, the other or both. Microsoft's longstanding relationship with corporate clients gives it leverage in the workplace. Should corporate IT managers deem Copilot the superior option, they can simply tell employees to use it. Microsoft, aside from the nudges it can drop into Windows, has no such sway with consumers. Executives say they aren't sweating the user chasm between ChatGPT and Copilot, confident that -- when the time is right -- they can get the product in front of consumers. They see Copilot's emphasis on being a personable companion as a potential advantage with a younger cohort that tends to use AI tools as sounding boards, rather than replacements for web search. A trial advertising campaign this spring catapulted Copilot up the charts on Apple's App Store, the company says. Copilot's monthly active users have increased 76% between April and June, to 23 million, Sensor Tower says. But the app's growth rate over the last year has trailed its major rivals, according to the market intelligence firm. Suleyman's team is banking on wowing people with two features: vision, which analyzes what's on a user's PC screen or captured by their smartphone camera, and voice chat. Engineers got the chatbot to recognize the difference between somebody taking a pause and finishing a thought, an effort that can result in surprisingly fluid conversations. They've also taken pains to keep the voice from sounding robotic. Shamontiel Vaughn, a writer and editor in Chicago, recently tried voice mode and was blown away that the software nailed the pronunciation of her name on the first go, something people almost never pull off. Then Copilot couldn't answer her next question. "I was very impressed, then very unimpressed three seconds away," she said. But Vaughn remains intrigued by Copilot, which she uses for research and the occasional bit of cooking advice after being prompted to try the software by its colorful swirl logo in Microsoft Edge. She's got a wish list -- the ability to make sense of scanned documents along with fine-grained control of image generation -- for what's become a helpful, if largely optional, tool. "It's nice to have," she said. "But I'm not going to lose my mind over it." -With assistance from Brody Ford, Austin Carr and Dina Bass. (Updates with year-to-sate share gain in third paragraph.) More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

Microsoft's Copilot challenge: 900 million ChatGPT downloads

(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. has spent billions of dollars to get people like Tyson Jominy using its Copilot, an artificially intelligent personal assistant designed to make it easier for consumers to navigate the world. But when Copilot pops up on Jominy's computer screen, it's typically an accident -- the result of a mistaken push of what used to be a control key. He would much rather use ChatGPT on his smartphone, or Grok, which helps him make sense of the rapid-fire stream of posts on X. Jominy, who manages teams working in data and analytics, has used Copilot at work, but he has no interest in using it off the clock. Jominy has a lot of company. While the Copilot smartphone app has been downloaded 79 million times, according to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT, the pioneering chatbot created by Microsoft partner OpenAI, recently surpassed 900 million downloads. Despite spending heavily on artificial intelligence and associated infrastructure over the past couple of years, the world's largest software maker is struggling to make headway against ChatGPT and a host of other AI assistants. Microsoft shares have surged about 20% so far this year, based largely on Wall Street's expectations that the company's AI bet will help secure its future, but some investors are starting to get impatient. "They have to win this," said Gil Luria, an analyst with D.A. Davidson. "If they don't, someone else will." Microsoft is staking its future on three Copilot-branded products: a coding assistant for developers, a workplace helper embedded in the likes of Outlook and Word, and a personal assistant built to help people like Jominy navigate and understand the world. At an all-hands meeting in May, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella told employees the goal is to get hundreds of millions of people using Microsoft's family of AI apps, Bloomberg previously reported. The company started baking AI into its products two years ago. The Bing search engine was restyled as an AI companion for the web. Windows users were told to get ready for a chatbot that would "personalize and navigate your PC." But behind the scenes, engineers were struggling to create the new world executives were pushing for. They had access to the same raw material -- the large language models built by OpenAI -- but mostly came up with slightly different spins on how chatbots might improve the lives of users searching the web or writing an email. Whatever advantage Microsoft had thanks to its close ties with OpenAI wasn't translating into hoped-for market share gains in products like Bing. Nadella eventually tired of the halting progress, and recruited Mustafa Suleyman 15 months ago to run Microsoft's consumer AI operation. Depending on who you talk to, Suleyman was either an inspired or risky hire. A British founder of two well-regarded AI startups, DeepMind and Inflection, he's widely considered a brilliant recruiter and motivator of engineers. He also acknowledged missteps while managing large teams at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, including setting "pretty unreasonable expectations." Besides leading the teams working on the consumer-focused Copilot, he's responsible for a bunch of existing products -- the Edge browser, the MSN news and web landing page, Bing search -- that boast millions of users but little cultural cachet. Suleyman tends to wax philosophical on the subject of artificial intelligence -- thinking aloud in LinkedIn posts and frequent podcast appearances on what it means to be human and the nature of computer intelligence. Translated, he's essentially saying that he wants to build AI assistants that keep humans in the loop and help better themselves. He professes zero desire to create machines smarter than people for the sake of a milestone. Artificial general intelligence "is not our mission," Suleyman said in an interview earlier this year. "Products are our mission, and we are singularly focused on: Is it useful? Does it help? Is it supportive? Am I happy?" More: Microsoft's CEO on How AI Will Remake Every Company, Including His Shortly after his arrival, Suleyman split the software that powers the consumer edition of Copilot from the workplace version, reflecting a belief -- informed by Microsoft's enormous roster of corporate clients -- that people will end up using distinct AI tools depending on whether they're at work or home. A personal chatbot might need to be able to hop among shopping apps or counsel someone who's experienced a death in the family, capabilities that aren't on the wish list of office workers toiling in Excel. Suleyman's consumer Copilot, though developed atop the same AI models as its corporate cousin, was rebuilt from the ground up. It was a rocky transition. People who used Copilot as their default Android smartphone assistant, summoning it with the push of a button, lost that ability, meaning they'd have to use the app to interact with the software. App stores lit up with reviews from frustrated users who watched features like the ability to quickly edit AI-generated images disappear overnight. The company has reintroduced some features, but complaints of bugs -- sudden ends to conversations, or cases where Copilot wiped conversations it was supposed to recall -- persist. Watching Microsoft's Copilot commercials, it's easy to imagine a range of basic things a Windows AI assistant could do -- from setting up appointments to identifying which programs are draining the battery. After all, Microsoft created a similar roadmap a decade ago with its Cortana voice assistant. In 2015, Cortana could drop into your calendar to find time for an appointment, compose an email, or set a reminder designed to go off when the user arrived at a certain place. But the Copilot app installed on Windows laptops can't even increase the volume or open Outlook. Suleyman has said AI will eventually remake graphical interfaces like Windows. But for now, Microsoft executives are wary of alienating users by forcing them to learn new habits and tend to bolt AI innovations onto existing tools. When the company started rolling out an AI agent to help manage PCs last month, it wound up in Settings, not the Copilot app. There are technical challenges, too. The operating system only gets a few major updates a year and isn't set up to receive frequent tweaks of the sort the Copilot team are rolling out. "That's our big challenge," Suleyman said. "There's a kind of annual rhythm to it, and there's also just a lot of degrees of freedom that are restricted." So by default, Copilot is a smartphone app. That's a problem because Alphabet Inc.'s Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS power virtually all of the world's mobile devices. Both are also weaving their own artificial intelligence tools into their mobile operating systems. There's no precedent for Microsoft building a must-have smartphone app from scratch. "It's incredibly difficult, especially when the owners of those devices are trying to do the same thing," said Matthew Quinlan, a former Microsoft manager who tried, with little luck, to get people using a Cortana smartphone app a decade ago. The Copilot app is a work in progress. The chatbot was recently given the capability to recall things users have brought up -- dietary preferences, say, or details about family members. But the results are uneven, and the software has a tendency to use its newfound memory to bring up irrelevant facts to keep a conversation going. Copilot can be a savvy shopping guide, though it has a habit of sending users to dead links. And like all chatbots, it's beholden to an imperfect set of information (much of it sourced from Bing's web crawlers), making it prone to confidently reciting outdated news or flubbing a weather forecast. Ask Copilot where to buy a travel charger, and it might display a map of nearby electric vehicle charging stations. In an effort to improve Copilot, Suleyman brought over the six-week product sprints he used at Inflection. At the end of the six weeks, and in periodic stops in between, employees are expected to candidly assess their progress. "I'm trying to get people into experimentation, risk-taking, being open about their hypotheses, not owning that personally as their pet project, but just being ruthless about experimentation," he said. Microsoft's struggles with its consumer Copilot echo the challenges the company is experiencing with the version it created for corporations. Bloomberg has reported that many office workers prefer ChatGPT, and have been pressuring their bosses to let them use it. Some companies are testing both Copilot and ChatGPT and awaiting employee feedback before deciding whether to use one, the other or both. Microsoft's longstanding relationship with corporate clients gives it leverage in the workplace. Should corporate IT managers deem Copilot the superior option, they can simply tell employees to use it. Microsoft, aside from the nudges it can drop into Windows, has no such sway with consumers. Executives say they aren't sweating the user chasm between ChatGPT and Copilot, confident that -- when the time is right -- they can get the product in front of consumers. They see Copilot's emphasis on being a personable companion as a potential advantage with a younger cohort that tends to use AI tools as sounding boards, rather than replacements for web search. A trial advertising campaign this spring catapulted Copilot up the charts on Apple's App Store, the company says. Copilot's monthly active users have increased 76% between April and June, to 23 million, Sensor Tower says. But the app's growth rate over the last year has trailed its major rivals, according to the market intelligence firm. Suleyman's team is banking on wowing people with two features: vision, which analyzes what's on a user's PC screen or captured by their smartphone camera, and voice chat. Engineers got the chatbot to recognize the difference between somebody taking a pause and finishing a thought, an effort that can result in surprisingly fluid conversations. They've also taken pains to keep the voice from sounding robotic. Shamontiel Vaughn, a writer and editor in Chicago, recently tried voice mode and was blown away that the software nailed the pronunciation of her name on the first go, something people almost never pull off. Then Copilot couldn't answer her next question. "I was very impressed, then very unimpressed three seconds away," she said. But Vaughn remains intrigued by Copilot, which she uses for research and the occasional bit of cooking advice after being prompted to try the software by its colorful swirl logo in Microsoft Edge. She's got a wish list -- the ability to make sense of scanned documents along with fine-grained control of image generation -- for what's become a helpful, if largely optional, tool. "It's nice to have," she said. "But I'm not going to lose my mind over it." -With assistance from Brody Ford, Austin Carr and Dina Bass. (Updates with year-to-sate share gain in third paragraph.) More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com