Microsoft AI Releases Its First-Ever Copilot Usage Study

Microsoft published the Copilot Usage Report 2025, which it says is the industry’s largest chatbot usage study to date. The study is based on more than 37.5 million anonymized consumer Copilot chats and it provides an interesting peek at how people are really using the chatbot.

“As 2025 wraps up, we’ve gone headfirst into a mountain of de-identified data, searching for the quirks, surprises, and secret patterns that shape everyday life with Copilot,” Microsoft AI’s Bea Costa-Gomes and Seth Spielman write. “We’re finding out just how far it fits into people’s daily rhythms, and how human its uses have become: We often turn to AI for the things that matter most like our health.”

Some of the key takeaways include:

Health is the number one topic. Health is the most often discussed topic with Copilot, beating out technology/general search; society, culture, and history; language learning and translation; money; news and current events; food and drink; art and design; entertainment; and science.

Time matters. In the early morning, religion and philosophy topics become the most common, and during the late afternoon commute, travel discussions rise to the top. Early in the year, programming was a top productivity-focused discussion, but this shifted to society, culture, and history at the end of the year.

Personal advice is huge. People are turning to chatbots for more personal advice tied to relationships, making life decisions, and other guidance. “Digital tools are becoming trusted companions for life’s everyday questions,” Microsoft says.

Usage is different on desktop and mobile. Users on desktop use Copilot in more ways than those on mobile, with 20 different topic-intent pairs making it into the top ten over the year. On mobile, only 11 such combinations reached the top ten.

Microsoft AI notes that it didn’t just de-identify the conversations used for the study, it extracted just summaries to determine topic and intent, maintaining full privacy. And no commercial or educational Copilot conversations were used in the data.

You can find the full Copilot Usage Report 2025 on the Microsoft AI website.