Microsoft says Microsoft 365 Copilot has reached 20 million paid enterprise seats, marking a major growth milestone for the company’s workplace AI push. The update came during the company’s quarterly earnings call, where CEO Satya Nadella said adoption is rising even as Copilot faces lingering doubts about how widely it is used.
The company also pointed to bigger customer rollouts as a sign that Microsoft Copilot is gaining ground inside large organizations. Nadella said the number of companies using more than 50,000 Copilot seats has quadrupled, and he named Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes-Benz, and Roche as customers with more than 90,000 seats each.
Large deployments expand
One of the biggest examples is Accenture, which Microsoft said signed on for more than 740,000 Copilot seats. Nadella called that agreement the company’s largest Copilot win to date, underscoring how much of Microsoft’s current AI growth is tied to large enterprise deals.
Microsoft also says usage is increasing, not just seat counts. According to Nadella, Copilot queries per user rose by nearly 20% quarter over quarter, while weekly engagement reached the same level as Outlook. He described that pattern as a daily habit of intense usage, a notable claim for a product still working to prove long-term value in office workflows.
The company tied some of that momentum to product changes inside its core Microsoft 365 apps. Nadella said agent mode is now the default experience across Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, giving users a new way to hand off and complete work with the AI assistant. Microsoft said those agentic features let Copilot take multistep actions directly inside documents and workflows.
Multiple models, broader AI push
Microsoft also emphasized that Copilot is not built around just one AI model. Nadella said users can access multiple models by default in chat, with intelligent auto-routing and the ability to combine models to produce responses. The company’s Microsoft 365 platform also supports Anthropic’s Claude, according to the reports.
Those product and adoption updates came alongside a much larger financial story about Microsoft’s AI spending. In its latest quarterly results, Microsoft reported revenue of $82.9 billion for the quarter, up 18% year over year, while Microsoft Cloud revenue rose about 29% to $54.5 billion. TechRadar also reported Azure growth at around 40% and said Microsoft’s AI business is now running at about $37 billion in annual revenue, up 123% from a year earlier.
Microsoft said forward demand remains strong. The company reported a $627 billion commercial backlog, up about 99%, which it said reflects heavy demand for cloud and AI services. That backdrop helps explain why Microsoft continues to spend aggressively on the infrastructure needed to support its AI products.
Spending climbs with demand
CFO Amy Hood said Microsoft has not been insulated from rising prices and global chip shortages as it expands its AI and data center footprint. TechRadar reported that Microsoft expects 2026 capital spending to be around $190 billion, with about $25 billion of that tied to higher component costs.
The company is also preparing to spend $40 billion on hardware and data centers in the next quarter, according to Hood’s comments cited in the report. That would follow $31.9 billion in capital spending last quarter, when about two-thirds of that amount went to short-lived assets such as CPUs and GPUs. Hood said Microsoft remains confident in the return on those investments because of stronger demand signals, rising product usage, and platform efficiencies.
For Microsoft, that leaves Copilot at the center of two closely connected trends: faster enterprise adoption and rapidly rising AI infrastructure costs. The company’s latest numbers show that customer demand is growing across both usage and paid seat counts, even as the scale of its AI buildout moves into a far more expensive phase.
