Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the company’s quarterly earnings call to push back against skepticism on two fronts: the real-world adoption of its Copilot AI tools, and the strategic implications of its revised OpenAI partnership.
On Copilot, Nadella reported 20 million paid enterprise seats for Microsoft 365 Copilot, with the number of companies holding more than 50,000 seats having quadrupled. A newly announced deal with Accenture covering over 740,000 seats was described as the largest Copilot win to date. Nadella said engagement had reached levels comparable to Outlook usage, with queries per user up nearly 20% quarter over quarter. Agent mode, which enables multi-step autonomous actions within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, recently became the default Copilot experience across those apps.
On the OpenAI partnership, Nadella was direct: Microsoft retained royalty-free access to OpenAI’s most advanced models and intellectual property through 2032, while no longer being required to pay for them. He dismissed concerns that losing exclusivity would weaken Microsoft’s AI position, noting the company’s AI revenue had surpassed a $37 billion annual run rate, up 123% year over year. Nadella also emphasized that Microsoft supports models from multiple providers — including Anthropic’s Claude — and that over 10,000 customers already use more than one AI model through its platform.
