Microsoft said Wednesday that adoption and engagement of its AI tool, embedded in Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook, continue to grow, despite the common perception that few people actually use Copilot.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced during the company’s quarterly earnings call that Microsoft 365 Copilot now has 20 million paid enterprise seats.

The company has seen a fourfold increase in the number of customers purchasing more than 50,000 Copilot seats, Nadella said, noting that Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche each now exceed 90,000 seats.

He also pointed to a recently announced agreement with Accenture covering more than 740,000 seats, which he called “our largest Copilot win to date.”

He maintains that usage is strong, saying people are engaging with Copilot at levels comparable to email.

“Copilot queries per user were up nearly 20% quarter over quarter. To put this momentum in perspective, weekly engagement is now at the same level as Outlook,” he said. “This is like a daily habit of intense usage.”

He stressed that Copilot isn’t tied to any single model, such as OpenAI’s.

“You now have access in chat to multiple models by default, with intelligent auto routing in agents with critique and counsel, you can use multiple models together to generate optimal responses,” he said.

He added that usage continues to be strong, noting that Copilot engagement is comparable to email activity.

Microsoft 365 also supports Anthropic’s Claude, for example.

Last week, Microsoft rolled out general availability of Copilot’s agentic capabilities, enabling it to perform multi-step actions directly within documents.