Over 18K firms use Azure OpenAI service, paid Copilot users reach 1 million: Satya Nadella

More than 18,000 organisations now use Azure OpenAI service, including new customers and the company is expanding its reach with digital-first companies with OpenAI APIs, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has said.

Leading AI startups are using OpenAI to power their AI solutions, therefore, making them Azure customers as well, he said during the company's Q1 2024 earnings call late on Tuesday.

On GitHub Copilot, he said the company is increasing developer productivity by up to 55 per cent.

“We have over 1 million paid Copilot users and more than 37,000 organisations that subscribe to Copilot for business, up 40 per cent quarter over quarter,” said Nadella.

GitHub Copilot Chat is being used by digital natives like Shopify as well as leading enterprises like Maersk and PwC to supercharge the productivity of their software developers, he told the analysts.

Nadella said that Microsoft is using the AI inflection point to redefine its role in business applications.

“We introduced Copilot and Dynamics 365 Field Service to help streamline frontline tasks,” he informed.

Copilot is your everyday AI assistant, helping you be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.

“Tens of thousands of employees at customers like Bayer, KPMG, Mayo Clinic, Suncorp and Visa, including 40 per cent of the Fortune 100, are using Copilot as part of our early access programme,” Nadella said.

When it comes to Teams, usage continues to grow with more than 320 million monthly active users, making Teams the place to work across chat, collaboration, meetings, and calling.

“This quarter, we introduced a new version of Teams that is up to two times faster while using 50 per cent less memory and includes seamless cross-tenant communications and collaboration,” the Microsoft CEO added.

More than 10,000 paid customers now use Teams Premium. There are more than 2,000 apps in Teams store and collaborative apps from Adobe, Atlassian, and Workday, each exceeded 1 million monthly active users on Teams.

“With Viva, we have created a new market category for employee experience, helping companies like Dell, Lloyds Banking Group, and PayPal build high-performance organisations,” said Nadella.