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AI at work

Microsoft said Copilot users grew 50% quarter on quarter. CIOs still owe finance a justification for each paid seat.

Satya Nadella told analysts on 28 October that the number of people using Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, rose 50% from the previous quarter.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by CNBC · Edition no. 52
Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Wikimedia, Public domain · original

Microsoft did not disclose how many paid seats Copilot has, CNBC and SiliconANGLE reported.

Finance chief Amy Hood did give one seat figure: the new Microsoft 365 E7 bundle already has "millions of seats". Revenue for the quarter rose 19% to $92.28 billion.

"People using" is a usage count. It does not tell you how many seats are paid for. Microsoft also gave no starting number for the 50%.

Forrester predicted on 21 October that AI will take 20% of business technology spending in 2027. In its own survey, only 22% of AI decision-makers reported a positive effect on EBITDA, a common profit measure, over the past 12 months.

For chief information officers (CIOs), Microsoft's public numbers give no paid-seat benchmark. Your own usage reports at least show which paid seats sit idle. Check what you are paying for against what people use before the next renewal or a move to E7.

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Companies in this story
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Our file on Microsoft

  1. 30 OctFiled later

    Microsoft's GitHub said AI agents wrote first drafts of over 40% of code change requests in September. In March it was 17%.

  2. 30 OctFiled later

    Microsoft is borrowing at least $25 billion, Bloomberg reported. Its CFO says cloud demand still exceeds what Microsoft can supply.

  3. 30 OctFiled later

    OpenAI's Codex and Microsoft's VS Code are still unpatched, researchers say. They found security flaws in five AI coding tools.

  4. 29 OctFiled later

    Microsoft says Canada Goose cut its month-end close to five days from eight. It had used old software and Excel.

  5. 27 Oct

    Warwickshire approved a Microsoft renewal worth about £9m in principle. It still has to find the extra £375,000 a year.

All 62 Microsoft stories

For your next steering committee

Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
  2. 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
  3. 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.

Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01

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