Summary: Microsoft’s April 29 FY26 Q3 call said paid enterprise Copilot seats passed 20 million, per-user query volume rose almost 20% quarter over quarter, and AI revenue reached an annual rate above $37 billion. Accenture alone added more than 740,000 seats. The revised OpenAI agreement gives Microsoft royalty-free access to OpenAI frontier IP through 2032, while OpenAI commits to over $250 billion of Microsoft cloud services.
The April 29 FY26 Q3 earnings call served as Microsoft’s data-backed reply to its doubters: paid enterprise Copilot seats have passed 20 million, query volume per user rose close to 20% from the prior quarter, and the AI business is running at an annual revenue rate above $37 billion, up 123% year over year. The same call also brought CEO Satya Nadella’s first detailed walkthrough of the revised OpenAI agreement — royalty-free access to OpenAI’s frontier-model IP through 2032 — along with his pledge that Microsoft “fully plan[s] to exploit it.”
Neither story stands alone; together they form one picture. All quarter long, investors went back and forth over two questions — does anyone genuinely use Copilot, and once exclusive access to OpenAI is gone, what cards does Microsoft still hold? Seat totals, engagement figures, and the IP clauses settled both in one call.
What’s Inside the 20 Million Seats
Strip away the headline and the details carry more texture. Customers buying at least 50,000 seats are now four times as numerous. Four companies — Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes, and Roche — each carry upwards of 90,000 seats. And the Accenture contract unveiled April 27 adds more than 740,000 seats in one stroke — Nadella’s “largest Copilot win to date.” Copilot has plainly left departmental trials for company-wide buying at the biggest enterprises.
The Usage Question: On Par with Outlook
Critics have long claimed Copilot gets purchased and then abandoned. This quarter Microsoft pushed back with behavior data: per-user queries rose almost 20% versus the prior quarter, and weekly engagement now matches Outlook email — “a daily habit of intense usage,” in his words.
Keith Weiss of Morgan Stanley put it plainly on the call: the Microsoft 365 Copilot figures are “super impressive and I think way ahead of most people’s expectations.”
Agent Mode Now Standard, Multi-Vendor Routing
On products: a week before earnings, agent mode became the default experience across Copilot, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and the agentic features that finish multistep tasks inside documents hit general availability on April 22. Nadella summarized it: “You now have a new way to delegate and complete work using Copilot.”
The model layer deserves the closer look. Copilot is multi-model out of the box, choosing among models with what Nadella labeled “intelligent auto routing” — nothing ties it to OpenAI alone, and Microsoft 365 already supports Anthropic’s Claude. Nadella claimed “the broadest selection of models of any hyperscaler,” and more than 10,000 customers have used more than one model.
The Revised OpenAI Deal: No Royalties on IP to 2032
The revised OpenAI agreement was the call’s other headline topic. Key terms: exclusivity is gone, yet Microsoft retains access to OpenAI’s IP — covering models and agent products — and no longer pays OpenAI for it, in practice royalty-free through 2032. OpenAI, in turn, has committed to buying upwards of $250 billion of Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft owns roughly 27% of OpenAI. Nadella was blunt: “We have a frontier model, with all the IP rights… all the way to ‘32 and we fully plan to exploit it.”
For context: right after the deal was sealed, OpenAI launched exclusive products with Amazon, talk spread among analysts that Microsoft had lost its AI edge, and the stock paid the price. The $37 billion AI run rate reported this quarter is the last complete quarter under the old agreement — the new one’s financial shape starts showing next quarter.
Signals for Enterprise AI Buyers
Three conclusions. First, office AI buying is shifting from seat-count pilots to contracts that cover the whole enterprise — Accenture’s 740,000 seats is the clearest marker yet. Second, answers to “is anyone using it” are coming less as promises and more as measurable behavior data, so buying decisions will lean on engagement metrics rather than license counts. Third, multi-vendor model routing is now baseline equipment for the major platforms — with Copilot running OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft’s in-house models side by side, the real work is deciding how to route each workload, not betting on one model vendor.