In the market for generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents, Microsoft (MS) has put top C-level executives out front to boost users amid a sluggish market response to Copilot. Cho Won-woo, head of Microsoft Korea, as well as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Ray Yap, are appearing in social media (SNS) ads to personally introduce the enterprise "365 Copilot."
Copilot is an AI-based productivity tool. MS Copilot is divided into the enterprise AI agent "365 Copilot" and the personal "Copilot AI Assistant." In particular, the enterprise version is an AI agent that, through the large language model based on OpenAI "GPT-5," integrates MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams into the 365 Copilot application to help with drafting, data analysis, deriving insights, automatic slide creation, email drafting and summarization, meeting summaries, and distilling key meeting points.
The reason executives are appearing in ads themselves is that it is not easy to increase users in the fiercely competitive generative AI market.
According to WiseApp Retail on the 4th, in last month's ranking of generative AI apps most used by Koreans, MS's personal AI agent "Copilot AI Assistant" ranked ninth with 300,000 monthly active users (MAU). That is only a 30,000 difference from 10th-place DeepSeek (270,000). ChatGPT ranked first with 21.62 million MAU. It was followed by Perplexity (1.84 million), adot (1.8 million), Wrtn (1.62 million), Grok (980,000), Ixio (540,000), Claude (480,000), and Google Gemini (420,000).
That said, "Copilot AI Assistant" has been steadily increasing its MAU. According to Mobile Index by data tech company IGAworks, "Copilot AI Assistant" increased its MAU from 125,524 in Nov. 2024 to 159,114 on Apr. and has been maintaining the 130,000–150,000 range. However, the enterprise "365 Copilot" recorded 3,658,879 MAU in Nov. 2024 and even expanded to the 3.74 million range in Mar. this year, but slipped to the 3.08 million range in Nov.
IT outlet The Information reported on the 3rd (local time) that, for the 2025 fiscal year that ended in Jun., MS lowered sales targets for those products by department after sales of AI products such as agents fell short of goals. The Information said, "Although agents can carry out tasks on behalf of humans, corporations are hesitating to adopt AI agent products because it is difficult to accurately measure the cost-saving effects when using them." However, an MS Spokesperson told CNBC, "The total sales quota for AI products has not been lowered."
Last year, private equity firm Carlyle adopted Copilot for meeting summaries and building financial models but faced difficulties because the AI failed to properly extract data from external apps. In the end, Carlyle recently reduced the expense on Copilot tools.
A Microsoft Korea official said, "We are focusing on enterprise Copilot in the Korean market, and corporate customers are growing rapidly."