Windows Latest reports that a developer-relations engineer posed the first question on X and that Microsoft employee Nicolas Bustamante answered yes, arguing that a San Francisco technology circle can give a misleading picture of enterprise use. His point has an obvious limit: his experience is not a survey of workers, any more than the skeptical replies are. The exchange is worth examining because Microsoft has now put a number behind its enterprise pitch—and announced a redesigned Copilot app intended to give people more reasons to use it.
Thirty million seats is not thirty million active users
Microsoft said in its July 29 earnings announcement that Microsoft 365 Copilot had surpassed 30 million paid seats. That is a substantial commercial milestone for the work product. It is not a disclosed count of people who opened Copilot this week, nor does it measure whether they liked the result. It also should not be confused with usage of the consumer Copilot app or GitHub Copilot; the shared name covers different experiences.
Microsoft did offer usage claims alongside the seat figure. On the earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said conversations per user had nearly doubled year over year and average weekly engagement was on par with Outlook and Teams. He also said the time it takes a customer deployment to reach monthly active usage above 80% of its user base had fallen from months to days. Those are company-reported measures, not a breakdown showing how many of the 30 million licensed seats are active each week. Without the underlying definitions and distribution, neither enthusiasts nor critics can turn the seat total into a universal verdict.
The scale of some deployments helps explain Bustamante’s argument. Microsoft cited an NHS England rollout to 505,000 staff, KPMG’s expansion across more than 276,000 professionals and HSBC’s commitment to 200,000 seats. Those examples establish enterprise purchasing and rollout plans; they do not establish the usage rate of every employee involved. Bustamante’s own biography says Fintool, the financial-research company he founded in San Francisco, was acquired by Microsoft in March 2026.
The distinction: A critic who never sees colleagues voluntarily launch Copilot may be accurately describing their workplace. An employee who sees demand from large organizations may also be describing a real market. Neither observation proves that “most people love it.”
Microsoft is changing what opening Copilot means
The debate arrived alongside Microsoft’s September 25 announcement of a redesigned Copilot experience. Its proposed answer to “Why would I open it?” goes beyond another chat window:
- Home brings Chat and Cowork together. Chat handles quick requests; Cowork is designed for delegated, multi-step work.
- Office in Copilot is intended to create and update editable Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint presentations within the experience, with changes synchronized with the Office apps.
- Code is pitched as a way to describe and build a small app, tracker, dashboard or workflow in natural language.
- Autopilot is a proposed persistent agent that can follow up and carry on recurring work, with its own identity and workspace inside an organization’s tenant.
This is a product announcement, not a claim that every customer has all four capabilities today. Microsoft says Home and Code are beginning to roll out through its Frontier program, while Autopilot is expanding to private preview at the end of September. Automatic routing of requests between Chat, Cowork and Code is still described as coming soon. An IT team evaluating the pitch should check what is actually enabled for its tenant rather than assume an announcement equals general availability.
There is a practical enterprise argument beneath the marketing: an assistant that works with company documents and governed tasks has a different job from a general-purpose chatbot. There is also a practical burden of proof. More persistent agents and more ways to create or change work make permissions, oversight and measurable results more important, not less. Microsoft describes tenant controls, audit and governance for Autopilot; organizations will need to judge how those controls perform for their own workflows as access expands.
Why Windows users may hear a different question
For many PC owners, “Copilot” means the Windows app, not a paid Microsoft 365 work seat. Microsoft’s support documentation says that Windows Copilot app runs on Microsoft Edge as a progressive web app. That is relevant to how the desktop experience feels, but it is not evidence that the enterprise product has identical behavior—or that a complaint about one Copilot experience settles the value of another.
Bustamante’s reported “tech bubble” explanation is therefore plausible as an explanation for conflicting impressions, not proof of widespread affection. The more useful question for an organization is narrower: Of the seats it pays for, how many people use Copilot repeatedly to finish worthwhile tasks, and does that benefit justify the cost and administration? Microsoft’s 30-million figure answers the purchasing part. Its new app is a bid to improve the rest. The verdict belongs to usage and outcomes, not an X reply.