I perceive MS as just being in the "get people using it, accustomed to it, used to it, habituated to using it throughout their day" phase for the default free Win10/11 tier.
That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users.
I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.
Just like using bing by default even if it's outright terrible (to the point of randomly suggesting the suicide hotline if you use it as a calculator), I make it do dumb bullshit for more Microsoft Rewards Points. It pays for xbox game pass for myself and several friends any time we've needed it
I think you'd be surprised at the number of average users who don't think of it as useless. As I've mentioned on comments elsewhere in this thread, remember what we here were talking about a couple years ago: LLM's killing websearch.
The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything.
It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
Is it the IT department’s fault for not enabling something? I don’t know, but does that matter?
If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
We make heavy utilization of Copilot Studio lite and full. Lite has quick access to SharePoint/Teams data. Full has access to _any_ data that has a Power Platform connector, REST API, MCP server, or Copilot [Graph] connector, all of which you can build or buy yourself. SAP, SQL, Databricks, you name it, Copilot Studio full can consume it.
It sounds like you don't have an M365 Copilot license but are instead using Copilot 365 Chat (the naming is horrid, absolutely).
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.
on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.
I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.
If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.
Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace
"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything."
I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.
Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.
The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.
That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?
That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.
I’m just conveying my experience. Whatever copilot is at my company’s Microsoft portal seems to do absolutely nothing and connect to nothing.
Even if this is my company not paying for the license, it seems like a pretty miserable way for Microsoft to try to tempt companies into buying one by delivering a completely useless “light” experience.
Everything you’re describing that’s wonderful about the Windows copilot button is the stuff I’m already doing on ChatGPT.com because that brand name came first.
The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.
What's worse then copilot on task bar is the copilot key on keyboard. This key doesn't even have its own scan code, instead it send something like Win+Shift+F23.
I get what you - a HN user - mean. But for the broader planet of Windows users, it just becomes this thing you click to get some general info from on whatever general topic, question, or need comes to mind. I think it is rapidly becoming quit banal - a thing people think of as just being another part of using their computing device. No fanfare; no fireworks; no hand-wringing over rights or privacy or training data: just a thing you click on to ask questions to as part of their normal day.
That little copilot icon will sit there unused and unloved by people who will, much like with online ads, screen it out whilst they do what they actually want to do.
For some, but what about the others? The reddit mentality of "everyone hates LLM AI tools" is just a very loud segment. What about everyone else? What about a random Joe who asks it questions to find some path through figuring out why their computer is acting all wonky? What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem? That is, treating it as an OS-native improvement over a search engine.
The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.
> What about the people who don't know the first thing about dealing with their water heater suddenly going south, and ask it some basic questions of how to approach that problem?
Why would you trust an LLM's advice about an appliance that can hideously disfigure you when they regularly fuck up basic advice about computers?
Unfortunately the majority of people don't know what they don't know. I've seen plenty of cases where an LLM is grossly wrong, but those don't seem to be publicised as much as "LLM does $awesome_thing" in the mainstream media.
I still think there's a potential niche for 365 Copilot in its boringness.
At work (not a tech company), there's an ongoing, slow, 365 rollout. The people who participate in the rollout are not technical in any way, but they all love it because they're not regular ChatGPT/Claude users, either. In a way, the restricted feature-set of Copilot compared to ChatGPT helps them, they're overwhelmed enough by Copilot.
IT loves 365 because it's so risk-averse. No big jumps, no surprises, clearly defined data and risk policies.
I think if they drill down into the boring, slow, predictable, they will capture the market of risk-averse non-tech companies, not people.
I've tried building agents using 365 for our internal documents and they're OK for basic stuff (what's in what document where - max 20 documents only!!), but langchain/RAG/whatever are a million times more powerful.
We use it in finance for the reasons above. Microsoft actually just added GPT 5 to Copilot so it’s much better than it used to be. I’ve used it to help write scripts in VBA and it’s really good for my use cases. Before GPT 5 it was worse than useless.
Boring is a short term thing - I think it's most useful to think about things like copilot AI for all windows users as a longer term initiative. Right now, I think MS is just letting people get used to a basic free tier. They will observe how Windows users put it to use, see to what degree of involvement people have with it, and evolve the product (and its pricing) from there.
Is it raking in cash right now? No. But that's just now. MS can and I feel is thinking longer term. Everyone is on a "Crash Dammit" Economist front-cover mode right, trying to will a crash into existence. Microsoft can think longer term about it - after all, we see younger generations diving in to make use of related technologies. Older demographics will, and are, slowly finding out what to make of the tech that is free with an OS install, and MS will see what kind of business to make out of that over time.
The problem with this broader topic is that people are restricting the time frame of the conversation to Right Now. MS doesn't need to worry about that so much, in the grand scheme of things.
Oh that's true. If AI is a bubble, and if it implodes, then MS might be the only AI place left standing if it can get its product into all of the non-tech companies in the world.
0% chance. The MIT 95% study showed that the tools are good, integration and process is the problem. There's a ton of work for people that can come into a company and set up a bespoke AI control plane/orchestration, the tooling needs to evolve a little bit so this can be a sane, repeatable business though.
We're trying/pushing this now as a small business, and it doesn't really work. Each deployment is/would be far too niche and expensive. No one has really gotten on board, so we've mostly just been doing normal data engineering/orchestration work instead.
Think of it like FDE work. It's cost front-loaded but very profitable on the back end, so early on you want to limit it to lighthouse customers. That being said my suggestion is to build some tooling for now to support your existing work that can be expanded gradually as a substrate for AI service, I expect the tools should mature within 6mo-1year, so you can offer trial AI services to new clients to reassess periodically.
Github Copilot is a pain too. Somehow they are capable of building potentially world changing LLM's, but can't build a working subscription billing system? I'm completely locked out of my Copilot access, that I paid for, with no response from support. Whole experience has somewhat soured me on relying on Microsoft for any critical part of my workflow if the response when things go wrong is complete silence.
Put the LLM on answering (or at least triaging) your support tickets faster.
Unsurprising. I tried it probably a year ago. I asked it what meetings were in my calendar for the day and it couldn’t even tell me that. To add insult to injury, they wanted an annual commitment with up front payment at the time.
Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really.
They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.
Who else can offer that?
For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
8 million active users after almost 2 years from making the $30pupm license available. Less than 2% of Microsoft 365 paying customers choosing to pay extra for Copilot. It's not difficult to see why Microsoft themselves have stopped reporting on AI revenue, as well as not disclosing any official numbers on M365 Copilot sales. Luckily, a source leaked these figures for Ed Zitron to report in his newsletter.
I don't know, does it matter? What I mean is that the product only just, in the grand scheme of things, got rolled out. MS isn't under some instant pressure to make loads of cash off this new feature. Year by year, people will just become used to having a tool, part of their OS, that they can ask questions to to get some general information on whatever topic.
It's easy to pick an arbitrary date and point out the lack of profit. But why don't we pick a date a year from now? Or three years. Or five years.
I think over time users will come to assume that their computing device has, as part of the many tools on it, a tool that they can ask about stuff and get general answers.
Is it profitable right exactly now? No. But I suspect it will become completely commonplace in a few years, and not even worthy of note or comment for the average user.
MS isnt some cash-strapped startup that needs to post instant profits right this moment.
Part of the reason is Microsoft's borgy/corpo-confusing service levels.
I have a paid 365 account and couldn't determine from logging in or account info screens if I was on paid or just the freemium version with my 365 plan
In testing out what I did have access to with Copilot, it was incredibly bad compared to ChatGPT or Claude, so I decided not to pay for Copilot whenever I see an ad for it.
Funny how renaming standard Office apps to "Microsoft 365 Copilot" in mobile apps, web home page for office.com etc. did NOT make people realize they should buy an additional $30 plan called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" to actually get to use all features of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.
The product naming is completely insane. In the span of a year my corporate portal changed name from portal dot office dot com, to Microsoft 365 dot com, and now its copilot something or other dot com.
The portal completely changed in design and the former portal functionality is hidden in a tiny search icon in a knock off chatgpt interface.
The average non-technical corporate user must be so confused.
In my limited experience using copilot at work, i think it has been a game changer for non-technical computer users. Many of my coworkers and i use it as the first attempt at research especially now that it is connected to SharePoint within my company and provides references to the documents it is pulling from. Saves hours for things like compiling international regulations or standards documentation. Additionally, it has super charged (maybe too strong of a word) document search within our environment... Sharepoint search is the worst.
Augmenting/replacing search seems to be one of the truly useful benefits of Copilot. Not sure if that's because it's good or because Teams/Sharepoint search is so bad.
Instead of fixing critical bugs in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and rolling out actual useful features, Copilot (with limited business context) is being prioritised and poorly shoved into every aspect of the product.
I used M365 Copilot at work, and it's amazing at summarizing discussions in Teams meetings, and terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called. I'm guessing that will improve with time and a few releases.
Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.
> terrible at accessing cells in a spreadsheet from which it's called
Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets?
Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't?
I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan.
I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?
1.8% is terrible adoption, especially in light of MSFT hijacking the right-CTRL key of every Windows licensed PC to rename it "CoPilot" key. I'm thrilled that Copilot is sucking wind because their over-aggressive pushiness about CoPilot in Windows and Office has been annoying and wasted my time having to figure out how to disable it but the REAL reason I despise CoPilot is that while stealing a key on my laptop's keyboard, MSFT literally broke the key permanently.
They changed how that key works at a low level so it cannot be cleanly remapped back to right-CTRL. This is because, unlike the CTRL, ALT, Shift and Windows keys, the now-CoPilot key no longer behaves like a modifier key. Now when you press the CoPilot key down it generates both key down and key up events - even when you keep it pressed down. You can work around this somewhat with clever key remapping in tools like AutoHotKey but it is literally impossible to fully restore that key back so it will behave like a true modifier key such as right-CTRL in all contexts. There are a limited number of true modifier keys built into a laptop. Stealing one of them to upsell a monetized service is shitty but intentionally preventing anyone from being able to restore it goes beyond shitty to just maliciously evil.
Use it like chat got ... There is no useful integration with any ms office app. Excel copilot can't edit cells, ms teams copilot cannot look meaningfully through your messages... Never tried it for other office apps...
It's being shoved down our throats at work, which is really annoying. Beyond being able to search for documents, there is little utility beyond what a local <1B param LLM gives me.
Even the "productivity" suggestions in teams are ridiculous - one of them is "roast me by my calendar"...wtf is that? How is that related to productivity at all?
Since when has Microsoft had a hit product before version 3? It's simply not in their corporate DNA.
Besides, I just recently saw a review of the newest Copilot for Excel by a serious spreadsheet jockey, and he was truly blown away. Basically, it knows everything Excel can do, how to do it, and it now truly understands numbers as numbers and when to use formulas, etc. etc. Basically, it went from smart automation to full on AI.
If Microsoft doesn't fall for short term thinking, the product will eventually succeed.
It’s garbage. My company has it, presumably by default. You ask it a simple question like “find the company holidays document” and it just can’t do it. It’s somehow not hooked up to the basic sharepoint document storage for the company.
I am just a typical Office user in a small company environment. Copilot buttons started popping in various Office applications. When I asked Copilot in Outlook to summarise mails from one of my contacts it happily searched the Internet and said it found nothing. AAA experience.
It’s an annual commitment by default. Admins might enable it if it was monthly. However, you can’t risk one license locking you into an M365 contract. Most admins can’t and shouldn’t make that decision. Failure on Microsoft’s part for the annual requirement. Otherwise, most would toggle the license on and give it a try.
Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory.
If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.
Active Directory comes free with Windows Server, it was never a "cash cow", that would be the Office suite.
Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.
The most pathetic aspect of Microsoft’s Copilot rollout is not Copilot’s poor performance & integration with SharePoint, but that Microsoft actually renamed Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows.
You’re a company whose main product has a brand recognition that ranks right up there with Coca-Cola and Apple, and you rename it after a new product that is a pile of hot garbage. Absolutely mind-boggling.
That little copilot icon is sitting there in the task tray, clickable and usable. I think people will, to whatever degree makes sense for them, get used to making some use of the basic free tier. Monetization / restrictions requiring some degree of limitations to upsell will eventually come for the currently half-billion or so Win11 users.
I get the point that few are currently paying for it, but there isn't all that much pressure to do so right now. That will come, later.
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