Report Confirms Microsoft’s Copilot Struggles

A new report in Bloomberg claims that Microsoft’s biggest customer base is ignoring Copilot and adopting rival ChatGPT instead. It confirms earlier reports of slow Copilot adoption and highlights how the viral success of ChatGPT is a problem for entrenched Big Tech monopolists in general and for Microsoft in particular.

According to the report, ChatGPT is making inroads in the enterprise, a market that most have ceded to Microsoft and its Microsoft 365 family of offerings. ChatGPT maker OpenAI says there are now over 3 million paying business users, a jump of 50 percent from early 2025. But this is also a major strategy shift for OpenAI: A year ago, it targeted smaller companies with less than 100 users in a subtle acknowledgement of Microsoft’s role with bigger businesses.

That deference is over. OpenAI and Microsoft are obviously major partners, given Microsoft’s $14 billion in investments and some decision-making capabilities on strategy. But they’ve also been openly fighting over the past year as OpenAI has sought more independence and Microsoft has lost interest in further datacenter investments. Most recently, OpenAI is reported to have prepared antitrust arguments to convince regulators to let it out of its Microsoft deal.

The problem for Microsoft is obvious enough: It has aggressively pushed its Copilot-branded AI solutions–which started off being based almost entirely on ChatGPT–to consumers and business customers alike, chaotically updating its products in a bid to keep ahead of the competition. But these efforts have seen little success. Copilot remains an also-ran in a market suddenly crowded with options, none bigger or more desirable than ChatGPT.

Indeed, the only area in which Microsoft seems to be taking a leadership role is capital expenditures. Its fiscal year concludes in less than a week, capping off an unprecedented outlay of over $80 billion on AI infrastructure in just 12 months, and with very little to show for it. Only Amazon, which largely sells cloud-hosted AI services to third parties through AWS, has spent more.

And ChatGPT isn’t just a Microsoft problem. To date, Open AI’s chatbot is still the only external AI that’s available through Apple Intelligence on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Amazon supposedly released its Alexa+ AI offering in the U.S., but only in early access, and good luck finding anyone who actually uses it. And while Google made an impressive showing at its I/O conference last month, its Gemini AI continues to lag behind ChatGPT by a wide margin when looking at both free and paid users. Worse, there is evidence that people are starting to turn to AI for general search needs, threatening Google Search.

In short, ChatGPT has become the Kleenex of AI, the trusted and known brand that everyone seems to prefer and choose when possible. And that means that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all vulnerable despite their current dominance.