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Report Confirms Microsoft’s Copilot Struggles—But Not Its Failure

By TheFinanceBase Team8 min read
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Microsoft Copilot faced a real enterprise adoption and sales problem, but the June 2025 report did not prove that the product was universally failing. Bloomberg interviews summarized by Thurrott on June 24, 2025 described Microsoft struggling to sell Copilot to some businesses because employees preferred ChatGPT. Later Microsoft data shows meaningful usage and reported benefits, while also confirming that results depend heavily on training, data quality, role, and sustained adoption.

What the report actually said

The headline refers to Bloomberg reporting based on interviews with more than 24 Microsoft customers and salespeople. As summarized by Thurrott, those interviews indicated that some companies were reluctant to buy Microsoft Copilot because employees were already asking for ChatGPT.

That is evidence of sales friction and employee preference, not proof that every Microsoft customer rejected Copilot. OpenAI also said ChatGPT had more than 3 million paying business users in mid-2025, up 50% from earlier that year. That figure was company-reported rather than independently audited.

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The date matters: this was a June 24, 2025 report. It should not be treated as a current measurement of every Copilot deployment in 2026.

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What “Copilot is struggling” means

In this context, “struggling” can refer to several different problems:

  • Difficulty converting Microsoft 365 customers into paying Copilot customers.
  • Employees preferring a familiar, general-purpose assistant such as ChatGPT.
  • Users trying Copilot once but not developing a regular habit.
  • Unclear return on investment after license, training, governance, and implementation costs.
  • Difficulty proving organization-wide productivity gains.
  • Deployment problems involving permissions, data quality, security, and workflow design.

The Bloomberg-based reporting directly supports the first two points. The other issues are important adoption risks, but they should not be presented as findings proven by those interviews alone.

What the report does—and does not—establish

Supported by the reported evidence Not established by the report
Some customers experienced sales resistance. All Microsoft customers rejected Copilot.
Some employees preferred ChatGPT. Copilot was commercially dead.
ChatGPT became a serious enterprise competitor. Copilot had no successful deployments.
Microsoft’s distribution advantage did not guarantee adoption. A definitive company-wide ROI figure or failure rate.

Why Microsoft’s distribution advantage was not enough

Microsoft has an unusually strong route to market. Copilot can be placed inside Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and other Microsoft environments. That gives Microsoft an important advantage over a standalone chatbot.

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But four different concepts are often confused:

  1. Availability: the feature exists in an app or is technically enabled.
  2. Licensing: the organization has assigned or purchased access.
  3. Usage: an employee has used the tool, perhaps once.
  4. Value: the tool produces trusted, repeatable improvements worth its total cost.

An icon in Microsoft 365 does not demonstrate habitual use. A large number of chats does not automatically demonstrate accuracy, productivity, retention, or financial return.

Copilot’s strongest value also depends on conditions outside the model itself. Microsoft 365 data must be organized, current, and correctly permissioned. Employees need role-specific guidance. Managers must support experimentation without making users feel that AI activity is workplace surveillance. The product must also be sufficiently fast, reliable, and useful for daily work.

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Why some employees may prefer ChatGPT

The report establishes that employee preference existed in some organizations, but it does not prove one universal reason. Plausible adoption factors include ChatGPT’s early consumer visibility, a simple general-purpose interface, familiarity with open-ended brainstorming and writing, and bottom-up employee demand.

Copilot’s advantage is different: it can work within Microsoft 365 workflows and, subject to permissions, draw on workplace context. That advantage may be less noticeable to someone who primarily wants general research, coding, creative work, or a standalone conversational assistant.

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This creates a common enterprise mismatch: management buys the tool that fits the company’s existing platform, while employees favor the tool that feels easiest or most capable for their immediate tasks.

Is Copilot actually being used?

Microsoft now provides administrators with separate reporting for Copilot usage, adoption, and impact:

  • The Microsoft 365 Copilot usage report covers adoption, engagement, enabled apps, agents, and related activity. Microsoft says the report generally becomes available within 48 hours after the relevant day.
  • The Copilot adoption template examines active users, retention, power users, sentiment, and differences between organizational groups.
  • The Copilot impact template attempts to connect activity with collaboration and productivity indicators.

These tools show that Microsoft treats adoption and realized value as central deployment questions. They do not, by themselves, prove that Copilot is performing well or poorly across the market.

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Administrators should distinguish between users who are licensed, users who try the product once, monthly users, weekly users, and habitual daily users. They should also separate activity from outcomes such as faster completion, better quality, less rework, or improved customer service.

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What Microsoft’s later research says

Microsoft’s own evidence presents a more mixed picture than the original headline.

Microsoft Research’s workplace synthesis says generative AI can improve productivity, but results vary by role, function, organization, adoption, and utilization. That qualification is important: a benefit observed among active users does not establish uniform value for every licensed employee.

Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index reported that 66% of surveyed AI users said AI gave them more time for high-value work, while 58% said they were producing work they could not have produced a year earlier. Among Microsoft’s “Frontier Professionals,” the figures were 80%.

These are Microsoft-published survey results, not an independently audited measurement of Copilot-wide causal ROI. They indicate perceived benefits among respondents, not guaranteed savings for a particular company.

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Microsoft also reported a privacy-preserving analysis of more than 100,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot chats in which 49% of conversations supported cognitive work such as analysis, problem-solving, evaluating options, or creative thinking. That demonstrates how the tool was used; it does not prove that the work was accurate, profitable, or better than an alternative.

A Microsoft-related research preprint analyzing approximately 5.5 million Copilot Chat sessions likewise provides evidence about usage patterns, not a complete measure of business value. A separate preprint analyzing 37.5 million deidentified Copilot conversations from January through September 2025 should be interpreted the same way.

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Where Copilot can be strongest

Copilot is most defensible when a company already relies heavily on Microsoft 365 and has well-managed workplace data. Potentially useful workflows include:

  • Summarizing Teams meetings and producing follow-up actions.
  • Condensing long Outlook email threads.
  • Drafting and revising documents.
  • Creating first drafts of presentations.
  • Finding and synthesizing information across Microsoft 365.
  • Analyzing spreadsheets with human review.
  • Preparing briefings, notes, and internal summaries.

Microsoft-related research identifies writing, information retrieval, analysis, decision-making, and strategizing as prominent Copilot Chat activities. These are good candidates for pilots because the organization can compare time, quality, and rework before and after deployment.

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Do not confuse Microsoft 365 Copilot with GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot is a separate coding product. Its performance among developers is not a direct measure of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s value in Outlook, Teams, Word, or Excel.

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Where Copilot is weakest or riskiest

Copilot should not be treated as an unsupervised decision-maker. Higher-risk situations include:

  • Legal, financial, medical, HR, security, or regulatory decisions.
  • Numerical analysis that has not been checked against source data.
  • Tasks relying on incomplete, outdated, duplicated, or contradictory files.
  • Workflows involving broad or incorrect SharePoint and OneDrive permissions.
  • Automatic sending, editing, or execution without approval.
  • Situations where a plausible but incorrect answer is worse than no answer.

Organizations should require human verification, define accountability, and specify how sensitive data, retention, citations, and audit records are handled.

What businesses should test before buying broadly

  1. Choose two or three representative departments. Include ordinary users, not only enthusiastic early adopters.
  2. Define five to ten concrete workflows. For example, meeting summaries, customer briefings, or email triage.
  3. Record a baseline. Measure completion time, quality, error rates, and rework before rollout.
  4. Audit the data foundation. Review identities, SharePoint and OneDrive permissions, sensitivity labels, retention, and search quality.
  5. Train users by role. Generic prompt advice is less useful than repeatable department-specific procedures.
  6. Track repeat usage. Compare assigned licenses with monthly, weekly, and sustained users.
  7. Measure outcomes, not prompt counts. Look for time saved, quality improvements, fewer handoffs, or reduced rework.
  8. Compare approved alternatives by task. Include ChatGPT or another assistant where employees already have strong demand, while applying the same governance standards.
  9. Expand selectively. Scale only where the benefits exceed licensing, training, security, and change-management costs.

Questions for Microsoft or a reseller

  • Which exact Copilot product and license are being proposed?
  • Which applications and data sources are included?
  • Can the organization run a limited departmental pilot?
  • Which features are generally available and which are preview features?
  • What usage, retention, sentiment, and impact data can administrators export?
  • How are inactive licenses handled?
  • What training and deployment support is included?
  • How are permissions, citations, data boundaries, and incorrect answers handled?
  • Which claimed benefits are directly measured and which are modeled estimates?

The financial and commercial lesson

For a business, the cost of Copilot is not limited to a per-user license. The total investment can include data cleanup, security reviews, training, governance, support, workflow redesign, and the opportunity cost of overlapping AI subscriptions.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot is most likely to fit an organization that is already standardized on Microsoft 365, has strong identity and data governance, and can connect the product to high-volume knowledge-work tasks. ChatGPT Business or Enterprise may be more attractive where employee demand and general-purpose use matter more than native Microsoft 365 embedding. Gemini is a natural comparison for Google Workspace organizations, while Claude offers another enterprise AI workspace. GitHub Copilot should be evaluated separately for software development.

There is no universal winner. The least expensive-looking option can become the most expensive if employees do not use it, if governance must be rebuilt, or if the company pays for several overlapping tools without assigning each a clear role.

Verdict

The report confirmed a real early adoption and positioning problem: Microsoft’s distribution advantage did not guarantee that employees would choose or regularly use Copilot, and some organizations reportedly preferred ChatGPT.

It did not confirm universal rejection, commercial failure, or the absence of useful deployments. Microsoft’s later reporting and research indicate meaningful usage and potential productivity benefits, but those benefits are uneven and often based on company-sponsored surveys, usage analyses, or modeled estimates.

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The practical conclusion for buyers is straightforward: do not purchase Copilot because it is already present in Microsoft 365, and do not reject it solely because a 2025 report described sales resistance. Run a measured pilot, verify the data foundation, compare approved alternatives, and expand only when sustained use produces outcomes worth the full cost.

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.

Written by TheFinanceBase Team

The Team behind TheFinanceBase.

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