Despite the lingering perception that no one really uses Copilot, Microsoft said Wednesday that its user base and engagement are growing for the AI tool that’s baked into M365 apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook email.

M365 Copilot now has 20 million paid enterprise Copilot seats, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call.

The company has quadrupled the number of companies paying for over 50,000 seats, Nadella said, noting that Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche have more than 90,000 seats. He pointed to the deal announced earlier this week with Accenture for over 740,000 seats. “Our largest Copilot win to date,” he said.

Plus, he insists that people are using it, engaging with Copilot as much as they do with 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 emphasized that Copilot is not dependent on any one model, like OpenAI.

“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.

Microsoft 365 supports Anthropic’s Claude, for instance.

In fact, Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss said on the quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, “Those Microsoft 365 Copilot numbers are super impressive and I think way ahead of most people’s expectations.”

Agent mode is one area that is driving usage, noting that “as of last week, Agent mode is now the default experience across Copilot and Word Excel and PowerPoint.”

Microsoft last week made its Copilot’s agentic capabilities generally available. This allows Copilot to take multi-step actions directly in the documents. “You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot,” Nadella said.

Google has added another 25 million paid subscriptions to its services over the past quarter, parent company Alphabet announced during its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday. The company said it now has 350 million paid subscriptions across its services, up from 325 million in Q4 2025, with YouTube and Google One — its cloud storage and subscription service — plans driving the recent growth.

The earnings report didn’t highlight the number of Gemini subscribers or its monthly active users. But access to advanced Gemini features is now bundled in with those Google One plans, which are growing.

The lack of solid numbers may suggest that the Gemini chatbot still has more than 750 million users, the same benchmark reported in the prior quarter. Google pointed to the growth of Gemini in the key enterprise market, noting a 40% quarter-over-quarter increase in paid monthly active users. It did not offer a solid number here, either.

YouTube ad revenue missed Wall Street expectations, even as it continued to grow year over year.

As Google pushes ad-free viewing as part of its YouTube Premium subscription plan, the video service has seen a decline in ad revenue that has worried investors. Per CNBC, Wall Street expected Alphabet to bring in $9.99 billion in YouTube ad revenue this quarter, but it pulled in $9.88 billion. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai had warned analysts last quarter that investors should evaluate YouTube’s business going forward based on a combination of ads and subscriptions: When users switch to a YouTube subscription plan, it has a negative impact on ad revenue.

Last year, YouTube’s annual revenue topped $60 billion across both ads and subscriptions, with Q4 2025 bringing in $11.4 billion in YouTube ads alone. This quarter, the YouTube ads figure was $9.9 billion. That’s up 11% year-over-year, the company pointed out, but a shortfall on analyst expectations suggests that consumers are continuing to move from ad-supported YouTube viewing to ad-free subscriptions through YouTube Premium. We expect to hear more about this on the company’s earnings call.

Either way, Alphabet’s stock is up after surpassing Wall Street’s expectations, with revenue of $109.9 billion, which included healthy cloud growth. Cloud revenue alone topped $20 billion.