Workers who use Microsoft software are now having as many conversations with Copilot AI as they are with real people in Outlook and Teams. Microsoft made that claim Wednesday during its fiscal year 2026 fourth-quarter earnings call.
According to a report by CNET, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors that "the number of conversations per [Copilot] user nearly doubled year over year" and that "average weekly engagement is on par with Outlook and Teams." Those figures come from a user base of more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats.
The company also reported significant growth in its newer agentic AI tools. Two months after Microsoft introduced Agent 365, a platform that lets business customers build and deploy AI agents, it had already registered nearly 40 million agents across more than 10,000 companies, Nadella said. Agentic AI refers to systems that can autonomously complete tasks without step-by-step human guidance.
Nadella also pointed to GitHub, the developer platform Microsoft owns, as a center of this shift. "The agentic era is being built on GitHub," he said. "Every major coding agent runs on the platform, and one in three pull requests on GitHub now involves an agent."
On the financial side, Microsoft beat investor expectations across the board. The company reported 18% revenue growth year-over-year for the quarter, driven largely by AI and cloud services. Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing division, surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time in the company's history. Microsoft also recorded a $3.2 billion gain from its stake in Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI system.
Net income came in at just over $35 billion, even after Xbox severance and what the company described as impairment charges connected to the layoff of 3,200 Xbox employees earlier this month.
Copilot revenue grew 60% quarter-over-quarter, Nadella said. Microsoft also added 31 new data centers across five continents during the period, signaling that spending on AI infrastructure is not slowing down.
The broader context for all of this is a shift in how businesses measure the value of AI. In the early days of AI adoption, the focus was on time saved and repetitive tasks automated. Now, with agents that can handle longer, more complex workflows, companies like Microsoft are pushing a different idea. Matt Firestone, general manager of product marketing for Copilot, said the goal is to enable "deeper cognitive work across the ecosystem."
US adults say help with work is one of the main reasons they use AI, second only to searching for information, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Microsoft is betting that Copilot becomes so embedded in daily work that it changes not just how tasks are completed, but how productivity itself is defined.
