Nadella paid $650M to recruit his AI chief. After 2 years he's quietly pushing him aside — these brutal numbers are why

Jacob Andreou, a erstwhile Snap enforcement who spent 8 years helping standard the societal platform, has been promoted to enforcement vice president of Copilot, reporting straight to Nadella. He'll pb a unified enactment spanning some user and concern products — 2 divisions that were antecedently housed successful abstracted groups.

Suleyman, who arrived astatine Microsoft done the $650 cardinal Inflection AI acquisition successful March 2024, is being redirected to absorption connected "superintelligence" — gathering the adjacent procreation of frontier AI models (2). It's a narrowing of his mandate that removes him from the merchandise helium was hired to marque palmy — and parks him successful a relation wherever the deliverables are measured successful years, not quarters. Copilot sits astatine astir 6 cardinal regular progressive users by aboriginal March 2026, down some ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, which had reached astir 9 cardinal according to Sensor Tower information cited by CNBC (2).

Microsoft 365 has much than 450 cardinal paid commercialized seats. After astir 2 years connected the market, Copilot has converted astir 15 cardinal of them into paying users. That's a 3.3% conversion rate, astatine $30 per idiosyncratic per month, generating astir $5.4 cardinal successful yearly revenue. That's little than what Microsoft spent connected infrastructure successful a azygous 4th (3).

Microsoft itself touted that fig during its Q2 FY2026 net call, noting that spot maturation was up much than 160% year-over-year. But the immense bulk of M365 users person entree to Copilot's basal chat features for free. The premium paid basal remains thin.

Independent probe tells a worse story. A Recon Analytics survey of much than 150,000 U.S. paid AI subscribers recovered that Copilot's marketplace stock fell from 18.8% successful July 2025 to 11.5% by January 2026 — a 39% contraction. The astir damaging finding: erstwhile workers lone person entree to Copilot, adoption sits astatine 68%. Add ChatGPT arsenic an enactment and Copilot drops to 18%. Add Gemini connected apical of that and conscionable 8% take Copilot. (4)