Despite Microsoft spending billions of dollars and integrating its smart assistant “Copilot” into nearly everything, ChatGPT still outperforms it by a vast margin in downloads, raising questions about the company’s strategy and its ability to win consumer hearts.
Introduction: the massive adoption gap
Microsoft has spent billions of dollars to get people to use its smart assistant, Copilot. But when Copilot appears on a computer screen, it is often by mistake. Many prefer using ChatGPT on their smartphones, or Grok to understand what is happening on the X platform. Despite the massive spending on artificial intelligence and its associated infrastructure, the world’s largest software company is struggling to make headway against ChatGPT and a host of other assistants.
The paradox lies in the numbers: while the Copilot smartphone app has been downloaded 79 million times, ChatGPT, the pioneering bot created by Microsoft partner OpenAI, recently surpassed 900 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower. This huge gap is alarming investors, some of whom are running out of patience.
Microsoft’s big bet
Microsoft is betting its future on three Copilot-branded products: a coding assistant for developers, a workplace assistant built into programs like Outlook and Word, and a personal assistant designed to help people navigate and understand the world. At a general meeting in May, CEO Satya Nadella told employees the goal is to get hundreds of millions of people using Microsoft’s family of AI apps. But reaching that goal seems far away.
Implementation challenges and confusion
Earth-shaking changes began two years ago when the company started integrating AI into its products. The Bing search engine was redesigned to become an AI-powered web companion. But behind the scenes, engineers were struggling to create the new world that executives were pushing for. Microsoft’s advantage through its close ties to OpenAI did not translate into the hoped-for market share gains in products like Bing.
The transition was difficult. Users watched features like the ability to edit AI-generated images disappear overnight. And while the Copilot app installed on Windows laptops can do basic things, it cannot even turn up the volume or open Outlook.
New leadership and philosophical vision
Ultimately, Nadella grew tired of the halting progress and hired Mustafa Suleyman 15 months ago to run Microsoft’s consumer AI operations. Suleyman, founder of renowned AI firms DeepMind and Inflection, is a brilliant recruiter and motivator for engineers. But he faces a massive challenge. Suleyman wants to build AI assistants that keep humans in the loop and help them improve themselves, rather than creating machines smarter than people just to achieve a breakthrough.
The smartphone battle
By default, Copilot is a smartphone app. That is a problem because Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS dominate nearly all mobile devices in the world. Both integrate their own AI tools into their mobile operating systems. There is no precedent for Microsoft building an indispensable smartphone app from scratch. Matthew Quinlan, a former Microsoft manager who unsuccessfully tried to get people to use the Cortana smartphone app a decade ago, said: “It’s very difficult, especially when the owners of those devices are trying to do the exact same thing.”
Conclusion: can Microsoft catch up?
Executives say they are not worried about the user gap between ChatGPT and Copilot, confident they can put the product in front of consumers when the time is right. They are betting on dazzling people with features like vision and voice conversation. But for now, Copilot feels like a “nice-to-have” tool, but not an essential one. As one user put it: “I’m not going to lose my mind over it.”
