Microsoft Lets Bosses Spot Teams That Are Dodging Copilot
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Microsoft CopilotAI AdoptionProductivity Metrics
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Microsoft Copilot
AI Adoption
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Microsoft is introducing new metrics in Viva Insights to track Copilot usage, sparking concerns about forced adoption and gaming the system, while highlighting the tool's limited value.
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> “A source that has seen materials related to sales has confirmed that, as of August 2025, Microsoft has around eight million active licensed users of Microsoft 365 Copilot, amounting to a 1.81% conversion rate across the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476045 - October 2025
And so the performance art must continue, at least until the AI investment music stops. Your options are get rich if in a position to (due to irrational exuberance and unsophisticated capital investment), or play along until the facade falls to keep your job. "It is what it is."
MSFT: Microsoft CEO Offloads $75 Million in Stock Amid AI Boom - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/msft-microsoft-ceo-offloads-7... - September 5th, 2025
I read a couple of articles and he seems to have been completely suckered in by the damn thing
from https://archive.is/oWbZB#selection-2387.572-2401.668
> Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well. He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on his iPhone so he can chat with the voice assistant about the content of an episode in the car on his commute to Redmond. At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots. “I’m an email typist,” Nadella jokes of his job, noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
this is no different to ending up in an alternate reality populated by your AI "girlfriends"
and will produce similar results
It makes me curious how much, if any, of the current LLM hype is simply coming from people who are dealing with the ELIZA effect.
[0] https://medium.com/where-thought-bends/the-7-trillion-delusi...
That part is no longer up for debate. The question is how useful and scalable this particular form of intelligence will turn out to be.
I do not see it as AI girlfriend. I see it as pushing the limits of the technology for productivity.
" Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages"
But .. I would never do that, without also having a human check what important bits don't get through.
I wonder if those who resist copilot aren't driven by the nascent feeling they are training their replacement.
> ... to maintain historical financial performance targets during ZIRP that are simply no longer obtainable.
If all else fails, they can ZIRP back to fantasy land and avoid being the losers by shifting it to the public once again.
If you understand product design, economics, corporate finance and various other disciplines well - its obvious what is going on.
MSFT wants to juice their numbers for the next earnings call to keep the mania going. Zzzzzzzzzzz
Ive spoken to people who work in the finance sector - portfolio management and tax audit - they laugh hysterically at how bad the tools are (copilot in particular) and resent how much they are being pushed down on them.
There are also ever changing, inscrutable licensing schemes, and too many similarly named products. It's impossible to know what to buy or how much it is going to cost.
This is even before you get to the quality of the product itself. I mean, part of the reason people aren't using it because it is hard to buy and use.
This has always been Microsoft's MO. They used to have a team you could call to figure out which product you actually needed.
People ? No, Microsoft
Autonomous agents are all the rage anyway, isn't it?
Perhaps this and also filling onedrive free space with random noise, to waste MS some storage in addition to CPU/GPU cycles.
Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity.
Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out.
Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired.
Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.
After working for a few weeks at high hourly rate, produce a report. Then grift the next suites.
Bonus points if you just have ChatGPT spit out the report :D
Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.
If you don't use AI at all you might be 5 or 10% slower, but quality might well even make up for it.
If you know them, AI supercharges you. If you don’t, you’re a lost cause no matter what.
That's kind of my point. There are junior engineers how have to go through a learning phase. Also, you may have this insight, but their managers may not.
For instance: my employer seems actively hostile to maintaining human understanding, even before AI. Ownership of apps moved around without sufficient knowledge transition or training. We've migrated Wiki systems 2 or 3 times over my career, and stuff always gets lost. The last migration (to SharePoint) was downright hostile: it was presented as an opportunity to "clean up," the half-ass automated migration deliberately excluded things more than a year old, and your docs got nuked unless someone was paying attention to save them (not a given). Now that SharePoint is in the cloud, its admins are actively scanning for things to delete, because the priority is minimizing their storage costs, not, you know maintaining knowledge of how things work.
One of my co-workers never uses any of it. For certain types of problems, he's the most productive member on the team.
Sounds like he needs a PIP!
MS productivity tools are a serious hindrance.
A risk that stock price declines for not buying into the hype. Actual productivity is not a concern.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912
Honestly, you were probably a liability to your company prior to AI. Now you can at least vibe-code. </sarcasm> I don't know anything about your situation, nor do you know mine.
I notice that you said "using" though and did not specify useful output. Useful output or even just a GitHub repo is kryptonite for "AI" proponents.
If you mean that Microsoft has to pretend that its employees are using "AI" in order to keep the P/E ratio of roughly 40, then of course an employee who does not participate in the con becomes a liability and you are absolutely right!
> Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired.
Bahahaha. In the best of all possible worlds.
Likely reality: Leaders say you're using the tools wrong, figure it out.
Employees: OK, so we train on the tools after hours?
Leaders: No.
Employees: Before hours?
Leaders: No.
Employees: During lunch?
Leaders: No.
Employees: Then when are we supposed to learn how to use the bloody tools?
Leaders: You're just going to have to figure that out for yourself.
Source: Happened to my mom when they moved from mainframe to Web-based at the insurance company.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/ref...
I look forward to the equivalent of a mouse jiggler.
This is the marketing page targeted at companies in the Netherlands:
https://www.microsoft.com/nl-nl/microsoft-viva/insights?mark...
I'm not looking forward to the inevitable leaderboard games with these scores.
One is a lot easier and requires a lot less thought and general understanding of one's own business
I'm using AI for some coding here and there, and I'm using it replacing certain kinds of questions I would previously have googled. So I'm certainly not against using AI at all. (We have a ChatGPT subscription.)
But, as a MS 365 Global Admin for a small business (ca. 50 people), I know what most of the many part of the MS eco system do. I use at least a dozen of their various service sites and tools throughout the week. I know what Entra is and does, Exchange (Admin), Teams, Defender (security website, not the installed tool), I'm not even going to mention the well-known Office apps, Azure, SharePoint, etc.
But when they try to get me to use Copilot, I never know what it is supposed to do for me? It just says "Copilot", and? Yes I could read and check and test what it is about. Maybe I will, some day. For now, every one of the services that I as Unix person had to discover for myself over the last year I had a clear goal before I went there, and I knew why I wanted to use a particular service. That's not true for Copilot, and my general AI background knowledge even as at least daily casual AI user I have no idea what to expect. I'm just not motivated to go there and do all the work of motivating myself myself.
For me, the problem is they market "Copilot" and not a function I want. That is too broad and too vague. If they just used it as part of the regular workflows, like Google did when they introduced AI answers, I would already be using it.
Instead of relying on users desire to use specific functionality, they seem to think users want "AI", what for exactly is secondary. But I want functions first, and don't care how they implement it, as long as it works.
PS: Oh and of course I'm afraid that if I start using any Copilot related stuff I may accidentally add something to our company's monthly bill. Which I only do when I actually need something, e.g. a new Office 365 Business Standard license. I don't want to pay for something I don't feel any need for, since the existing tools are already far more than enough.
I just checked and it's Microsoft 365 Copilot: 28,10 € per user and month.
That is way, WAYYY too much. The MS 365 Business Standard licenses we usually buy are only 11,70 € per user and month, and they are for what we actually need (Email, Office, OneDrive, basic identity).
They want me to pay almost two and a half times as much again for optional add-on functionality at best???
Whatever Copilot offers, even if it's something super-great, in the end it is optional and not the core of what we want from Microsoft.
Food for thought: If Microsoft is already monitoring this, maybe they could help automatically remove the big boss from the meeting?
Not that I really care though.
...ask Copilot to play a nice game of clue, checkers, tic tac toe, chess or whatever.
Adoption metric accomplished! :)
(That's what you get when you force people who don't want to use AI to use AI.)
Somehow, I'm confident the result will almost always be that other companies are using it more.
https://technologymagazine.com/news/why-is-microsoft-ceo-sat...
The official narrative is that Nadella wants to focus completely on his misguided "AI" obsession. Could it be that the board forced Nadella to install this second CEO as a backup if Nadella's fantasies fail?