OpenAI Is Eating Microsoft's Lunch

Microsoft has somehow managed to have another Cortana moment. Despite its AI assistant, Copilot, being built into Windows machines and compatible with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that millions of people are stuck with, it simply cannot get people to love the in-house option. According to a new report, ChatGPT has managed to rack up about 10 times the downloads that Microsoft’s Copilot has received.

Bloomberg cites data provided by Sensor Tower that found the Copilot app for iOS and Android has been downloaded about 79 million times, which, to be fair, is a pretty solid install base. The problem is that ChatGPT has already surpassed 900 million. You don’t have to ask a chatbot which number is bigger.

There’s no shame in getting beat, but Microsoft had a pretty major head start getting people to adopt its products, and they just…didn’t. Because the company has a partnership with OpenAI, it was early to the AI assistant game, launching Copilot before Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta AI, or DeepSeek got going. Despite that, Copilot sits in fourth place when it comes to total installations. It trails not only ChatGPT, but Gemini and DeepSeek.

In part, Copilot’s lagging popularity is a result of mismanagement on the part of Microsoft. Bloomberg highlights how the company chose to split the AI assistant into two, creating a work and personal version. Doing so led to people who were using Copilot as their default assistant on Android devices losing access to the AI’s functionality as the company rebuilt the product from the ground up. Things are even worse on desktop where, for some ungodly reason, Copilot can’t access basic system-level controls like increasing or decreasing the volume or opening an app like Outlook—things that “dumb” smart assistants like Siri had the capability of doing a decade ago.

Somehow, this just keeps happening to Microsoft. The company that was once found guilty of operating a monopoly by favoring its Internet Explorer web browser over alternatives has not been able to use the same playbook to find success since. The smart assistant Cortana, Copilot’s predecessor, failed to gain the relevance of Siri or Alexa despite having a massive install base because of its positioning in the Windows OS. Bing has the benefit of being the default search engine on Windows devices and was the first search engine to integrate AI results, and yet its market share has barely ticked upward at all.

It seems no matter what, Microsoft just cannot make people love its products. Perhaps it could try making better ones and see how that goes.