{"id":477225,"date":"2026-09-27T07:36:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T07:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/477225\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T07:36:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T07:36:29","slug":"does-anyone-use-copilot-microsoft-employee-says-most-people-love-it-blames-the-san-francisco-tech-bubble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/477225\/","title":{"rendered":"“Does anyone use Copilot?\u201d: Microsoft employee says \u201cmost people love it,\u201d blames the San Francisco tech bubble"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Microsoft<\/a>Microsoft employee defends Copilot adoption against the Silicon Valley tech bubble. Image: Microsoft<\/p>\n

If getting roasted on social media was a sport event, Microsoft might have had several World Cups by now. When CEO Satya Nadella announced the biggest update to Copilot<\/a>, going to the extent of calling it a new OS for work, under it came a snarky comment that managed to gather 200k views.<\/p>\n

\u201cSerious question: does ANYONE use copilot?\u201d, asked a Developer Relations Engineer. Usually, such comments don\u2019t get a reply from Redmond, because they\u2019re sure they can\u2019t win. However, the new Copilot has enough potential that a Microsoft employee did give a proper reply.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe new Copilot super app experience. Image: Microsoft<\/p>\n

\u201cSerious answer: yes,\u201d wrote Nicolas Bustamante, arguing that the \u201cnobody uses Copilot\u201d take comes from living inside a San Francisco tech bubble. He backed it up with number claiming Microsoft 365 Copilot now has more than 30 million paid seats.<\/p>\n

But the number wasn\u2019t his point. He explained that enterprise customers have completely different needs than a startup employee scrolling X.<\/p>\n

Microsoft employee says the Copilot bubble looks different outside San Francisco<\/p>\n

Bustamante joined Microsoft after it acquired Fintool, his AI financial-research startup, in April 2026. On his site, he describes his current role as leading a team \u201cbuilding proactive AI agents that understand your work, operate in the background, and get things done before you ask,\u201d which, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the pitch for Autopilot (Copilot\u2019s new OpenClaw-like agentic capability).<\/p>\n

Truth be told, his quoted repost wasn\u2019t trying to one-up the commenter, but to explain why, despite all the criticism, Copilot still has a lot of paid users.<\/p>\n

\"MicrosoftMicrosoft employee defends Copilot as commenter mocks it under Satya Nadella\u2019s post. Image: Screenshot from X<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore joining Microsoft, I knew maybe five people who used Copilot. I lived in a San Francisco tech bubble, and all of us worked at companies with fewer than 5,000 employees.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the argument: tech and AI-related topics on X skew toward startup founders, developers, and people at smaller companies. Enterprises want something completely different. In his words: \u201cLarge companies need AI that works with their existing data and meets their privacy and compliance requirements, often across multiple countries. Add governments and regulated industries, and it gets even more complex. Copilot can handle that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microsoft clearly doesn\u2019t have the smartest chatbot. But they\u2019re selling identity, permissions, and compliance deeply integrated with their chatbot, which happens to matter more to a bank\u2019s legal team than the latest Claude model.<\/p>\n

\"OpusOpus 5.5 in GitHub Copilot. Image: GitHub<\/p>\n

Bustamante also mentioned his daily use: \u201cCopilot CLI for coding (with access to models from Gemini, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic!) + Copilot Cowork for regular chat.\u201d Model access varies by plan and organizational policy, so this isn\u2019t every Copilot user getting free rein over four AI labs. But it confirms Microsoft has given up on pitching that their model is the best in favor of pick whichever model; we\u2019ll host the wrapper.<\/p>\n

30 million paid seats does not mean 30 million people opening Copilot<\/p>\n

Microsoft confirmed the 30 million paid seats figure<\/a> on its July earnings call, along with a claim that weekly engagement with Copilot now matches Outlook and Teams. A paid seat only tells you a company bought the license and nothing about whether the person holding it opens the app once a week or never.<\/p>\n

\"CopilotCopilot has 30 million paid users. Image: Microsoft<\/p>\n

The replies to Bustamante were sure to mention this. \u201cMy job kinda pay for it But I don\u2019t use it. So is my seat counted in those 30million,\u201d one asked.<\/p>\n

Another comment read: \u201cPeople \u2018use\u2019 it because its incorporated in Office. Nobody actually uses it.\u201d A third called the stat \u201cthe worst possible one here,\u201d saying across 50 to 100-employee companies, they\u2019d \u201cnever seen anyone actually use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

My favourite reply, though, compared Copilot to something Windows Latest has been calling out for years: \u201cCopilot is the Teams of AI. People use because they have no option with their employer paying for those nice annual Microsoft Azure + Office all-inclusive sweet enterprise deals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MSMS Teams resource usage. Credit: Windows Latest<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve said the same thing about Teams<\/a> more times than I can count: bundled, mandatory, and tolerated instead of loved, mostly because of how heavy it feels.<\/p>\n

Of course, these are individual opinions, same as Bustamante\u2019s. But back in July, Windows Latest reported Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption was under 4.5%<\/a> after three years, with only 1% of users opening it weekly.<\/p>\n

The Copilot backlash explains why half of X assumes nobody uses it<\/p>\n

Copilot on Windows has changed shape so many times it\u2019s hard to keep track: a sidebar, then a native WinUI app, then, in April, a version that quietly bundled a full copy of Microsoft Edge<\/a> and jumped from under 100MB of RAM to as much as 1GB at idle.<\/p>\n

\"CopilotCopilot in Task Manager. Credit: Windows Latest<\/p>\n

Also, I don\u2019t think I have to mention how Microsoft shoved Copilot into every corner of Windows 11 in 2025, only to realise their grave mistake in 2026<\/a> and remove it from Notepad, Snipping Tool, and other places.<\/p>\n

Even the branding turned into a mess, culminating in Microsoft merging its Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot social accounts<\/a> just a day before Nadella\u2019s announcement.<\/p>\n

\"MicrosoftMicrosoft Office > Microsoft 365 > Microsoft 365 Copilot > Microsoft Copilot. Credit: Windows Latest<\/p>\n

Someone who has only met Copilot as an unwanted Office button or a RAM-hungry web app is going to have a wildly different opinion than an enterprise employee using it to search company files with proper permissions attached.<\/p>\n

Microsoft is betting the new Copilot finally closes that gap<\/p>\n

Whether the 30 million seats were unused or not is beside the point now, because the new Copilot gives Microsoft a much bigger reason to make people open the app. Home merges Chat and Cowork, Code lets you build small apps in plain English, Autopilot keeps working after you\u2019ve logged off, and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now have a place inside the Copilot app.<\/p>\n

\"MicrosoftMicrosoft calls Copilot a new OS for work with Home, Code, and Autopilot. Image: Microsoft<\/p>\n

To be honest, this is a considerably bigger pitch than the Copilot that got mocked as Clippy 2.0 for most of its existence.<\/p>\n

Bustamante\u2019s argument was that people already use Copilot for real work, just not the ones shouting about it on X. Nadella\u2019s new super app is Microsoft\u2019s attempt to make that true for a lot more people, tech bubble or not.<\/p>\n

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