If getting roasted on social media was a sport event, Microsoft might have had several World Cups by now. When CEO Satya Nadella announced the biggest update to Copilot, going to the extent of calling it a new OS for work, under it came a snarky comment that managed to gather 200k views.
“Serious question: does ANYONE use copilot?”, asked a Developer Relations Engineer. Usually, such comments don’t get a reply from Redmond, because they’re sure they can’t win. However, the new Copilot has enough potential that a Microsoft employee did give a proper reply.
“Serious answer: yes,” wrote Nicolas Bustamante, arguing that the “nobody uses Copilot” take comes from living inside a San Francisco tech bubble. He backed it up with number claiming Microsoft 365 Copilot now has more than 30 million paid seats.
But the number wasn’t his point. He explained that enterprise customers have completely different needs than a startup employee scrolling X.
Microsoft employee says the Copilot bubble looks different outside San Francisco
Bustamante joined Microsoft after it acquired Fintool, his AI financial-research startup, in April 2026. On his site, he describes his current role as leading a team “building proactive AI agents that understand your work, operate in the background, and get things done before you ask,” which, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the pitch for Autopilot (Copilot’s new OpenClaw-like agentic capability).
Truth be told, his quoted repost wasn’t trying to one-up the commenter, but to explain why, despite all the criticism, Copilot still has a lot of paid users.
“Before joining Microsoft, I knew maybe five people who used Copilot. I lived in a San Francisco tech bubble, and all of us worked at companies with fewer than 5,000 employees.”
That’s the argument: tech and AI-related topics on X skew toward startup founders, developers, and people at smaller companies. Enterprises want something completely different. In his words: “Large companies need AI that works with their existing data and meets their privacy and compliance requirements, often across multiple countries. Add governments and regulated industries, and it gets even more complex. Copilot can handle that.”
Microsoft clearly doesn’t have the smartest chatbot. But they’re selling identity, permissions, and compliance deeply integrated with their chatbot, which happens to matter more to a bank’s legal team than the latest Claude model.
Bustamante also mentioned his daily use: “Copilot CLI for coding (with access to models from Gemini, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic!) + Copilot Cowork for regular chat.” Model access varies by plan and organizational policy, so this isn’t every Copilot user getting free rein over four AI labs. But it confirms Microsoft has given up on pitching that their model is the best in favor of pick whichever model; we’ll host the wrapper.
30 million paid seats does not mean 30 million people opening Copilot
Microsoft confirmed the 30 million paid seats figure on its July earnings call, along with a claim that weekly engagement with Copilot now matches Outlook and Teams. A paid seat only tells you a company bought the license and nothing about whether the person holding it opens the app once a week or never.
The replies to Bustamante were sure to mention this. “My job kinda pay for it But I don’t use it. So is my seat counted in those 30million,” one asked.
Another comment read: “People ‘use’ it because its incorporated in Office. Nobody actually uses it.” A third called the stat “the worst possible one here,” saying across 50 to 100-employee companies, they’d “never seen anyone actually use it.”
My favourite reply, though, compared Copilot to something Windows Latest has been calling out for years: “Copilot is the Teams of AI. People use because they have no option with their employer paying for those nice annual Microsoft Azure + Office all-inclusive sweet enterprise deals.”
We’ve said the same thing about Teams more times than I can count: bundled, mandatory, and tolerated instead of loved, mostly because of how heavy it feels.
Of course, these are individual opinions, same as Bustamante’s. But back in July, Windows Latest reported Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption was under 4.5% after three years, with only 1% of users opening it weekly.
The Copilot backlash explains why half of X assumes nobody uses it
Copilot on Windows has changed shape so many times it’s hard to keep track: a sidebar, then a native WinUI app, then, in April, a version that quietly bundled a full copy of Microsoft Edge and jumped from under 100MB of RAM to as much as 1GB at idle.
Also, I don’t think I have to mention how Microsoft shoved Copilot into every corner of Windows 11 in 2025, only to realise their grave mistake in 2026 and remove it from Notepad, Snipping Tool, and other places.
Even the branding turned into a mess, culminating in Microsoft merging its Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot social accounts just a day before Nadella’s announcement.
Someone who has only met Copilot as an unwanted Office button or a RAM-hungry web app is going to have a wildly different opinion than an enterprise employee using it to search company files with proper permissions attached.
Microsoft is betting the new Copilot finally closes that gap
Whether the 30 million seats were unused or not is beside the point now, because the new Copilot gives Microsoft a much bigger reason to make people open the app. Home merges Chat and Cowork, Code lets you build small apps in plain English, Autopilot keeps working after you’ve logged off, and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now have a place inside the Copilot app.
To be honest, this is a considerably bigger pitch than the Copilot that got mocked as Clippy 2.0 for most of its existence.
Bustamante’s argument was that people already use Copilot for real work, just not the ones shouting about it on X. Nadella’s new super app is Microsoft’s attempt to make that true for a lot more people, tech bubble or not.
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