Overview

• Managers have been directed by Julia Liuson to factor employees’ use of Copilot and other internal AI services into their performance evaluations
• Liuson emphasized that AI usage is a fundamental part of how work is done and core to every role at Microsoft
• Some teams are exploring the introduction of a formal performance metric tied to AI tool usage for the upcoming fiscal year
• The mandate aims to address slow internal adoption of Copilot, which counts 33 million users compared with ChatGPT’s 400 million and has faced user skepticism over features like Recall
• Competitive pressure from startups such as Cursor overtaking Copilot in developer segments and a renegotiation with OpenAI have heightened Microsoft’s urgency to embed AI proficiency