Your Company Bought Copilot Licences. Is Anyone Using Them?

Sandton, September 23, 2026

Most organisations that deployed Microsoft Copilot can answer one question with confidence: how many licences they bought. Far fewer can answer the question that actually matters — how many employees are using it, for what, and whether it has changed how the work gets done.

How much of your Copilot investment is licensed, and how much of it is actually being used?

Industry adoption research published this year offers a consistent, uncomfortable pattern. Across enterprise deployments, roughly 35–50% of licensed users engage with Copilot fewer than five times a month, or not at all. Weekly usage among licensed seats commonly sits in the 20–35% range. 

The gap between what organisations pay for and what employees actually use has become large enough that some analysts now calculate cost per active user rather than cost per licence — because the list price stops meaning much once half the seats are idle.

None of this means Copilot does not work. It means deployment and adoption are two different events, and most organisations have only completed the first one.

The Rollout Is Usually the Problem, Not the Tool

The typical Copilot rollout follows a familiar shape: licences are purchased, a short introductory session is run, and employees are left to work out the rest on their own. 

A finance manager sits through a general Copilot demonstration, returns to a live spreadsheet with real formulas and real deadlines, and cannot see how the demonstration applies to the report in front of them.

This is not a training failure in the traditional sense. It is a sequencing failure. Employees were shown what Copilot can do in general before anyone established what their own work actually requires it to do.

The organisations that get meaningful use from Copilot tend to have done something different first: they examined how specific employees do specific work — reconciling a report, comparing two versions of a contract, preparing a management pack — before deciding where Copilot fits into that process.

"Buying Copilot answers the question of access. It does not answer the question of use," says Arnold Muscat, Managing Director of College Africa Group. "An organisation only gets a return once an employee can open a real spreadsheet, a real document or a real report and knows exactly what to ask Copilot to do with it."

Workplace Discovery Before a Rollout Plan

This is why College Africa Group does not begin a Copilot engagement with a workshop. It begins with AI Workflow Discovery — examining how work currently moves through a department, where employee time is actually going, and which recurring tasks are genuinely suited to Copilot assistance.

Only once that picture exists does a rollout plan make sense. The sessions that follow are deliberately not theoretical. 

Employees work with Copilot inside their own spreadsheets, their own finance packs and their own documents — comparing versions, interrogating formulas, drafting commentary, structuring reports — rather than a generic sample file that has nothing to do with their job.

This distinction matters because faster output is not automatically better output. Copilot can summarise a document or restructure a formula, but an employee who does not understand the underlying data cannot judge whether the result is correct. Discovery and practical, workplace-based application build that judgement alongside the tool itself.

The Return Is in Active Use, Not Licence Count

A useful test for any organisation currently running Copilot is simple: pick five recurring tasks employees perform weekly, and establish how many of those employees are using Copilot to do them, and how.

If the honest answer is "we don't know," the licence count says very little about the value being created. If the answer is "hardly anyone," the appropriate response is not to abandon the tool — it is to establish why, and build a rollout that closes that gap.

The CAG Perspective

Better Business Processes. Stronger Workplace Skills. Smarter AI. Greater Business Productivity.

A Copilot licence creates access. It does not create adoption. College Africa Group's AI Workflow Discovery identifies where Copilot genuinely fits your teams' recurring work, and our practical, workplace-based training builds the rollout plan and the skills to use it there — not in a generic demonstration, but inside your own spreadsheets, finances and documents.

Explore AI Workflow Discovery: AI Workflow Discovery South Africa

Speak to College Africa Group: WhatsApp or call 083 778 4903.