Mustafa Suleyman’s inaugural year as the CEO of Microsoft AI has been anything but a honeymoon period. Hailed as one of the AI industry’s most accomplished minds after co-founding Google DeepMind and the high-profile startup Inflection, Suleyman was brought in to lead Microsoft’s consumer AI resurgence. But despite hefty investments and relentless feature launches, Microsoft’s Copilot lags far behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, raising tough questions about strategy, internal culture, and the future of consumer-facing AI at Redmond.
When Microsoft orchestrated the controversial—in structure, if not in value—deal that brought Mustafa Suleyman and much of his Inflection AI team to the company, it was more than just a talent acquisition. Officially a $620 million licensing agreement, padded with a $30 million hiring fee, the move telegraphed both ambition and impatience. Microsoft was uneasy with its dependence on OpenAI, especially in the wake of OpenAI’s leadership turbulence in late 2023, and frustrated by sluggish uptake of tools like the reimagined Bing chatbot. Bringing in a heavyweight like Suleyman was meant to create an internal engine for innovation, reinvigorate Microsoft’s AI credentials, and lessen the gravitational pull that OpenAI held over its strategic direction.
But more than a year out, results are mixed. Internally, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood’s reports revealed a vexing reality: Copilot boasted around 20 million weekly active users—a respectable absolute figure, but one rendered anaemic when stacked against ChatGPT’s explosive 400 million. External stats did nothing to soften the blow, with independent web analysts measuring ChatGPT’s daily traffic at more than 50 times that of Copilot. Despite the whirlwind of Copilot announcements, the product simply hasn’t caught the public imagination, nor has it become the default go-to consumer AI.
A lightning rod for these tensions has been the engineering of Microsoft’s homegrown large language models. Tasked with building competitive in-house AI, Suleyman’s team, under the MAI (Microsoft AI) banner and led by Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan, set to work on a monumental new architecture, codenamed MAI-1. Early reports pegged MAI-1 at an eye-popping 500 billion parameters, leveraging both Inflection's proprietary data and methodologies distinct from Microsoft’s existing smaller-scale Phi models (popular among AI academics for their synthetic data foundations).
But size didn’t guarantee success. According to insiders, MAI-1’s training runs exposed more than mere technical bottlenecks—they unearthed a philosophical rift. The most public flashpoint occurred after a joint training effort with Sebastien Bubeck’s Phi team yielded underwhelming results. Blame quickly centered on the use of synthetic training data, with Simonyan insisting that “contamination” from this non-human input was to blame for model underperformance. This spat spilled into public Slack channels and led to a reorganization of Bubeck’s group. By October 2024, Bubeck had left for OpenAI—a clear sign of unresolved cultural integration challenges.
Reports from late 2024 surfaced claims that, following the OpenAI board shakeup, Microsoft had quietly restricted compute resources to its partner—ostensibly to provide a competitive advantage for Copilot and other internal initiatives. Other anecdotes, like Suleyman reportedly berating OpenAI staff over tech transfer delays, signaled mounting tension. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and senior leadership were allegedly incensed by Suleyman’s appointment. Though both sides have emphasized an ongoing partnership “until 2030 at least,” beneath the surface, the cooperation is charged with rivalry, skepticism, and mutual wariness. This tension surfaces periodically, calling into question the long-term health of a relationship that underpins both companies’ biggest innovations.
Suleyman also introduced a different evaluative lens: SSR, or “successful session rate.” Instead of total user count, his team is focusing on how effectively Copilot fulfills user intent. He asserts that this has “gone up dramatically” thanks to backend improvements and behavioral analysis—though actual figures remain closely guarded. This switch in metrics could be interpreted as a rational adaptation, an acknowledgement that Microsoft may not have the muscle to unseat OpenAI in mainstream adoption, but could still win niches and retain enterprise relevance. Or, it may be read as moving the goalposts—a hallmark of embattled projects struggling to gain traction.
The tension is further heightened by Microsoft’s simultaneous move to grant open, unrestricted access to some advanced features. This see-sawing may indicate a company still searching for its AI identity: is Copilot a broad platform, a suite of pro tools, or a tightly integrated enterprise assistant? The answer remains as fragmented as the company’s pricing experiments.
CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, known for taking a pragmatic approach to underperforming divisions, are keeping a watchful eye. The subtext is clear: if the current trajectory doesn’t produce a clear path to dominant market share or at least unassailable enterprise value, Microsoft will not hesitate to pivot strategy—or leadership.
Furthermore, Microsoft continues to show a creative willingness to iterate—on both product and monetization—which, while sometimes confusing for end users, is arguably the mark of a healthy, adaptable organization. Whether Copilot ultimately wins the user war, these experiments provide institutional learning and set the table for breakthroughs in related fields (enterprise, developer tooling, cloud integration).
Equally concerning is the persistent lag in user adoption. While chasing “successful session rate” may make sense for niche enterprise deployments, Microsoft is positioning Copilot as a mainstream platform. If millions more users continue defaulting to ChatGPT or other rivals, Microsoft’s direct consumer influence may wither, leaving it forever a “tight second.”
And finally, as AI becomes more pervasive—and controversial—Microsoft must navigate a thicket of expectations, from internal activist employees to external regulators and end-users. Missteps here could stall its broader AI acceptance, regardless of technical merit.
If Microsoft can harmonize its internal teams, clarify its product vision, and lean into its unique strengths—massive distribution, rapid iteration, and infrastructure know-how—it may yet carve out the AI niche it covets. Whether Copilot overtakes ChatGPT is an open question, but in the meantime, Microsoft is proving that the path to AI leadership is nonlinear, and, for better or worse, unrelentingly human.
Source: WinBuzzer Microsoft’s AI Mastermind Mustafa Suleyman Faces Pressure as Copilot Growth Stalls - WinBuzzer
The High-Stakes Gamble: Reinventing Microsoft’s Consumer AI
When Microsoft orchestrated the controversial—in structure, if not in value—deal that brought Mustafa Suleyman and much of his Inflection AI team to the company, it was more than just a talent acquisition. Officially a $620 million licensing agreement, padded with a $30 million hiring fee, the move telegraphed both ambition and impatience. Microsoft was uneasy with its dependence on OpenAI, especially in the wake of OpenAI’s leadership turbulence in late 2023, and frustrated by sluggish uptake of tools like the reimagined Bing chatbot. Bringing in a heavyweight like Suleyman was meant to create an internal engine for innovation, reinvigorate Microsoft’s AI credentials, and lessen the gravitational pull that OpenAI held over its strategic direction.But more than a year out, results are mixed. Internally, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood’s reports revealed a vexing reality: Copilot boasted around 20 million weekly active users—a respectable absolute figure, but one rendered anaemic when stacked against ChatGPT’s explosive 400 million. External stats did nothing to soften the blow, with independent web analysts measuring ChatGPT’s daily traffic at more than 50 times that of Copilot. Despite the whirlwind of Copilot announcements, the product simply hasn’t caught the public imagination, nor has it become the default go-to consumer AI.
Culture Clash: From Controversial Newcomer to Internal Discord
Microsoft is no stranger to high-stakes integration, but Suleyman’s arrival as an outsider—particularly one whose exit from Google was shadowed by rumors of abrasive leadership—was bound to create ripple effects. Microsoft’s veteran insiders bristled at his distinct style and the rapid rise of his Inflection cohort, threatening an already delicate internal balance.A lightning rod for these tensions has been the engineering of Microsoft’s homegrown large language models. Tasked with building competitive in-house AI, Suleyman’s team, under the MAI (Microsoft AI) banner and led by Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan, set to work on a monumental new architecture, codenamed MAI-1. Early reports pegged MAI-1 at an eye-popping 500 billion parameters, leveraging both Inflection's proprietary data and methodologies distinct from Microsoft’s existing smaller-scale Phi models (popular among AI academics for their synthetic data foundations).
But size didn’t guarantee success. According to insiders, MAI-1’s training runs exposed more than mere technical bottlenecks—they unearthed a philosophical rift. The most public flashpoint occurred after a joint training effort with Sebastien Bubeck’s Phi team yielded underwhelming results. Blame quickly centered on the use of synthetic training data, with Simonyan insisting that “contamination” from this non-human input was to blame for model underperformance. This spat spilled into public Slack channels and led to a reorganization of Bubeck’s group. By October 2024, Bubeck had left for OpenAI—a clear sign of unresolved cultural integration challenges.
Sibling Rivalry at the Cutting Edge: Microsoft and OpenAI’s Uneasy Dance
The meta-narrative of Microsoft’s AI ambitions is inextricably linked to its partnership with OpenAI, creator of GPT-4 and the omnipresent ChatGPT. Despite public statements from Suleyman describing the relationship as a “good-natured sibling rivalry,” the lines between collaborator and competitor have grown increasingly blurred.Reports from late 2024 surfaced claims that, following the OpenAI board shakeup, Microsoft had quietly restricted compute resources to its partner—ostensibly to provide a competitive advantage for Copilot and other internal initiatives. Other anecdotes, like Suleyman reportedly berating OpenAI staff over tech transfer delays, signaled mounting tension. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and senior leadership were allegedly incensed by Suleyman’s appointment. Though both sides have emphasized an ongoing partnership “until 2030 at least,” beneath the surface, the cooperation is charged with rivalry, skepticism, and mutual wariness. This tension surfaces periodically, calling into question the long-term health of a relationship that underpins both companies’ biggest innovations.
Rethinking Metrics: Can Copilot Win by Redefining Success?
As the gulf in user numbers stubbornly persists, Suleyman has increasingly pushed back on the traditional metrics of platform success. In a 2025 CNBC interview, he acknowledged Microsoft’s strategy of being a close but deliberate “second” to OpenAI—allowing it to optimize for cost and targeted use cases, rather than bleeding resources in an arms race for absolute leadership.Suleyman also introduced a different evaluative lens: SSR, or “successful session rate.” Instead of total user count, his team is focusing on how effectively Copilot fulfills user intent. He asserts that this has “gone up dramatically” thanks to backend improvements and behavioral analysis—though actual figures remain closely guarded. This switch in metrics could be interpreted as a rational adaptation, an acknowledgement that Microsoft may not have the muscle to unseat OpenAI in mainstream adoption, but could still win niches and retain enterprise relevance. Or, it may be read as moving the goalposts—a hallmark of embattled projects struggling to gain traction.
Relentless Product Iteration: Copilot’s Feature Barrage
If Copilot is lagging in pure numbers, it isn’t for lack of trying. Under Suleyman’s stewardship, Copilot’s development cadence has accelerated dramatically. In early and mid-2025 alone, Microsoft delivered a string of high-visibility updates:- Wave 2 Spring Release: Introduced Copilot agents (Researcher, Analyst, and Skills), a new Agent Store for expansion, and powerful IT governance and control tools. Organizations gained Copilot Control System capabilities to better oversee AI usage within workflows.
- Copilot Memory & Personalization: Greater ability for Copilot to remember context, user preferences, and past interactions—an effort to deepen individualization and presumably boost SSR.
- Copilot Actions: Expanded task automation, from travel bookings to intricate workflow triggers, seeking to integrate Copilot more directly into daily digital routines.
- Deep Research and Collaborative Pages: Added advanced research capabilities and the ability to work across persistent, shared pages—Blending AI assistance with group productivity.
- AI Podcasts and Shopping: Pushed Copilot into content generation (AI-created podcasts) and commerce.
- Windows Integration: Copilot Vision, offering on-screen analysis within any app, and enhanced File Search to locally scan documents. Both were previewed for Windows Insiders, hinting at Copilot’s eventual embedding in the core consumer OS experience.
The Risks of Experimentation: Monetization Quandaries and User Pushback
By 2025, the AI gold rush’s next phase had begun to reveal where hype met hard business realities. Microsoft’s decision to lock certain Copilot capabilities behind a paywall—specifically within apps that had long been free—felt like a strategic gamble. On one hand, it signaled that Microsoft saw AI functionality as premium, something worth paying a subscription for rather than a universally accessible add-on. On the other, it risked alienating users who might feel coerced into an upsell, especially as ChatGPT continued to offer certain functionalities for free or on a freemium basis.The tension is further heightened by Microsoft’s simultaneous move to grant open, unrestricted access to some advanced features. This see-sawing may indicate a company still searching for its AI identity: is Copilot a broad platform, a suite of pro tools, or a tightly integrated enterprise assistant? The answer remains as fragmented as the company’s pricing experiments.
The Weight of Scrutiny: Protests and Public Accountability
No high-impact AI leader today can ignore the growing ethical, social, and political scrutiny. Mustafa Suleyman’s own stage has become a microcosm for these pressures. At Microsoft’s 50th Anniversary event, employee protestors stormed the stage, denouncing the company’s rumored AI collaborations with the Israeli military. Suleyman acknowledged their right to protest—though the sincerity of this gesture is open to interpretation—and the interruption served as a sharp reminder: the AI arms race will not unfold in a vacuum. Public sentiment, regulatory oversight, and moral considerations will increasingly shape who “wins,” how products are built, and who remains at the table.Leadership Under the Microscope
The Suleyman experiment has brought Microsoft both visionary ambition and the inevitable friction that comes from institutional upheaval. On one side, there’s the massive technical upside: a world-class AI team tasked with producing breakthrough models with access to Microsoft’s resources. On the other, the company is confronting the human limits of change—engineering disagreements, cultural pushback, and differing philosophies about what “success” even looks like in hyperscale consumer products.CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood, known for taking a pragmatic approach to underperforming divisions, are keeping a watchful eye. The subtext is clear: if the current trajectory doesn’t produce a clear path to dominant market share or at least unassailable enterprise value, Microsoft will not hesitate to pivot strategy—or leadership.
Strengths: Strategic Optionality and Relentless Experimentation
Despite the growing pains, Microsoft retains a core strategic strength: optionality. By investing in its own models and aggressively iterating, the company is no longer a passive partner to OpenAI or any other external innovator. This self-sufficiency, as messy as its early implementation appears, is a must-have for long-term relevance in consumer AI.Furthermore, Microsoft continues to show a creative willingness to iterate—on both product and monetization—which, while sometimes confusing for end users, is arguably the mark of a healthy, adaptable organization. Whether Copilot ultimately wins the user war, these experiments provide institutional learning and set the table for breakthroughs in related fields (enterprise, developer tooling, cloud integration).
Risks: Culture Clashes, Fragmentation, and Falling Behind
But the risks loom large. The integration of the Inflection cohort into Microsoft’s established engineering culture has been turbulent—marked by very public disagreements and high-profile departures. Cultural incompatibility has doomed more than one ambitious tech initiative; if it becomes entrenched, it could undermine Copilot’s ability to execute.Equally concerning is the persistent lag in user adoption. While chasing “successful session rate” may make sense for niche enterprise deployments, Microsoft is positioning Copilot as a mainstream platform. If millions more users continue defaulting to ChatGPT or other rivals, Microsoft’s direct consumer influence may wither, leaving it forever a “tight second.”
And finally, as AI becomes more pervasive—and controversial—Microsoft must navigate a thicket of expectations, from internal activist employees to external regulators and end-users. Missteps here could stall its broader AI acceptance, regardless of technical merit.
The Road Ahead: A Company, a Product, and a Vision in Flux
It’s easy to read the headlines and view Mustafa Suleyman’s first year as a turbulent disappointment—a drag on morale punctuated by lasting culture wars and lagging numbers. But to cast it as an outright failure would be both premature and simplistic. AI at this scale is the ultimate high-variance business. Failure of one approach often seeds the success of the next; today’s culture clash may become tomorrow’s new norm.If Microsoft can harmonize its internal teams, clarify its product vision, and lean into its unique strengths—massive distribution, rapid iteration, and infrastructure know-how—it may yet carve out the AI niche it covets. Whether Copilot overtakes ChatGPT is an open question, but in the meantime, Microsoft is proving that the path to AI leadership is nonlinear, and, for better or worse, unrelentingly human.
Source: WinBuzzer Microsoft’s AI Mastermind Mustafa Suleyman Faces Pressure as Copilot Growth Stalls - WinBuzzer
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