Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told the company’s fiscal first-quarter earnings call on 28 October that daily Copilot users rose nearly 50 percent from the previous quarter and more than fivefold from a year earlier. User satisfaction improved nearly 20 percent quarter over quarter to another all-time high, and 90 percent of Copilot queries now use auto mode, which routes tasks across models for quality, speed and cost.
The numbers behind the surge
Automated tasks have nearly doubled since July, Nadella said, as customers move from trying Copilot to letting it do real work. The number of customers with more than 50,000 Copilot seats increased more than eightfold year over year, including Capgemini, HCLTech, Hitachi Group, Truist Financial and the UK Revenue and Customs Department.
Volkswagen announced plans just last week to deploy Copilot to more than 330,000 employees, described as one of the largest deployments to date in Europe. That single deal illustrates the scale Microsoft is now reaching: Copilot is no longer a pilot project for a few thousand enthusiasts, but a company-wide system for hundreds of thousands of workers.
The call also showed how Microsoft’s business model is changing. The company is expanding from per-seat subscriptions to include consumption billing, where business units pay for agents that handle higher-value work. The number of Copilot customers actively consuming credits through usage-based billing grew more than 75 percent over the quarter.
Chief financial officer Amy Hood sounded a note of caution on that shift, saying consumption pricing outside software development will likely move more slowly because it requires changes in sales practices and customer education. The direction, however, is clear: subscriptions for everyday intelligence, plus usage billing for agentic work that delivers measurable value.
From experiment to infrastructure
Nadella argued that enterprises are moving beyond artificial intelligence experiments toward systems that handle business processes. He pointed to Unilever automating order intake and trade disputes, Rolls-Royce using AI for jet-engine maintenance planning and supply chains, and Raiffeisen Bank International deploying AI across more than 20 business processes, including credit workflows.
That framing matters because it answers the question hanging over the whole AI boom: are companies actually using these tools, or just paying for them? The Copilot figures suggest genuine adoption at scale, at least inside Microsoft’s ecosystem. Satisfaction at an all-time high, paired with fivefold user growth, is hard to square with shelfware.
Agent activity on GitHub tells the same story at developer scale. Nadella said agents now open more than a third of all pull requests on the platform, with agent-generated requests up sixfold in six months, as coding agents from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all show up to work there.
The same call showed Microsoft extending its agent platform in parallel, opening its Copilot harness to every builder through Foundry. The harness lets customers build agents that reason, use tools and complete long-running work, which is exactly the kind of higher-value activity the new consumption billing is designed to charge for.
Why It Matters
Copilot has become Microsoft’s clearest proof that AI assistants can grow from a feature into a platform. Fivefold user growth, eightfold growth in the largest customers, and a 330,000-seat deployment in a single European company together mark the moment Copilot stopped being an experiment and became part of how large organisations work.
The billing shift may matter even more in the long run. If consumption pricing takes hold, Microsoft’s revenue from Copilot will track how much value agents actually deliver, not just how many seats a company bought. That aligns Microsoft’s incentives with its customers’ results, but it also makes Copilot spending harder to budget, which is why Hood’s caution deserves attention.
Background
Microsoft’s cloud revenue passed 63 billion dollars in the quarter behind these Copilot figures, a result covered in our report on the company’s cloud beat.
Source: PYMNTS earnings report and earnings call transcript
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