Copilot Engagement Catches Up With Teams and Outlook at Microsoft

Microsoft reported its fourth-quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings on Wednesday and, for the first time, shared numbers that put Copilot on par with the company's most widely used tools. According to CEO Satya Nadella, weekly engagement with the AI assistant has now matched Outlook and Teams, two applications used by hundreds of millions of employees worldwide.

Engagement matches Teams and Outlook

Nadella told analysts on the earnings call that average weekly engagement with Copilot is now comparable to two applications that have been the backbone of Microsoft 365 for years. It marks a shift in how the company reports success for its AI products, having previously focused mainly on licenses sold, now on whether employees actually keep coming back to the tool day after day.

Average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

The number of paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats grew from more than 20 million in April to over 30 million by the end of June, roughly 10 million licenses added in a single quarter. Microsoft also noted that the time between deploying the tool and employees starting to use it heavily has shrunk from months to a matter of days, while user satisfaction has hit record levels over the past three quarters.

Large companies buying entire license fleets

The company said the number of customers with more than 50,000 Copilot seats grew sevenfold year over year. Among companies with over 90,000 licenses, Microsoft named Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes and Roche, a sign that rollouts are moving from single-department pilots to entire organizations spanning tens of thousands of employees.

GitHub Copilot, the assistant for developers, is a separate product that has reached 50 million users. It falls into a different category than Microsoft 365 Copilot, but together the two figures show that Microsoft's AI tools have stopped being an add-on tested by enthusiasts and become part of daily work at companies that rely on the Office suite and GitHub.

Azure drives results as spending climbs

The Azure cloud segment topped $100 billion in revenue for the past fiscal year, growing 41 percent, and in the fourth quarter alone growth reached 43 percent, according to CFO Amy Hood. That growth is largely driven by demand for infrastructure to train and run AI models, including Copilot.

Microsoft's capital expenditures reached $41 billion in the fourth quarter alone, and the company said AI infrastructure spending will exceed $50 billion in the first quarter of the new fiscal year. Microsoft shares rose about 7-8 percent in after-hours trading following the results, as investors read it as a sign that rising AI spending is starting to translate into real revenue, not just promises.

What it means for companies in Poland

For Polish companies using Microsoft 365, the numbers signal that Copilot is no longer an optional add-on, and Microsoft will increasingly push it as a standard part of licensing, alongside growing pricing pressure and the integration of agentic features directly into Word, Excel and Teams. Companies that have so far treated Copilot as a single-department pilot can expect pressure from Microsoft to scale licenses across the whole organization, the way Bayer and Mercedes have done.

At the same time, capital spending running into the tens of billions of dollars per quarter means AI infrastructure costs will, to some degree, feed through into the price of cloud services and licenses used by Polish Azure and Microsoft 365 customers as well. The scale of investment also suggests that competition between Microsoft, Google and Amazon for the AI cloud market is more likely to accelerate than slow down in the coming quarters.