A Wake-Up Call from Redmond, Microsoft's HQ
The numbers are in, and they are both startling and unsurprising. At the end of 2025, Microsoft conducted a study that most people overlooked. They tracked 300,000 employees using their AI assistant, Copilot. For the first three weeks, excitement was palpable. People were experimenting, sharing discoveries, marvelling at what the technology could do. Then came the cliff. Enthusiasm dropped sharply, and most people quietly stopped using AI altogether.
Let that sink in. Microsoft, one of the world's largest technology companies, with presumably some of the most tech-savvy employees on the planet, watched 80% of their workforce abandon their own AI tool after the initial honeymoon period.
The employees who continued using AI discovered something important: AI is not just a tool you learn to operate. It is something you learn to manage. This insight applies to all AI tools—not just Copilot—and it fundamentally changes how we should approach AI training. The challenge is not technical. It is, as I have argued before, psychological and institutional (Schram, 2025).
