# AI in the Enterprise: How People Use M365 Copilot Chat

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23958 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23958/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01470/) (2024)
- [The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06590/) (2023)
- [Which Economic Tasks are Performed with AI? Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04761/) (2025)
- [TnT-LLM: Text Mining at Scale with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12173/) (2024)
- [Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15080/) (2025)
- [Measuring AI Diffusion: A Population-Normalized Metric for Tracking Global AI Usage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02781/) (2025)
- [Early Impacts of M365 Copilot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11443/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12236/) (2026)
- [Sophistication in GenAI Use: Field Evidence from a Large Firm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27364/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

M365 Copilot is used every week by millions of people across more than a million companies around the world as part of their workflows. Uniquely positioned in the AI landscape given its near-exclusive use for work purposes, M365 Copilot can offer a clear picture of how people use AI for work and where that usage may expand next. This paper characterizes that usage through direct classification of user interactions with M365 Copilot Chat. Based on an anonymized and privacy-preserving analysis of a sample of approximately 5.5 million sessions, we combine a learned classification of user intent with a classification of O*NET work activities done with M365 Copilot Chat. We find that M365 Copilot is emerging as an everyday assistant for knowledge work: writing dominates, but users also rely on it for information retrieval, analysis, decision making and strategizing, and evaluating and diagnosing programs and systems, among others. Information seeking tasks remain common, but time trends suggest a relative shift away from ``chat as search'' and toward content and communication-related work. Comparisons across occupational groupings and to work done in the labor market further show that usage is broad but uneven, where the relative share of work done with M365 Copilot Chat cuts across jobs in some cases and is occupation-specific in others. Areas of relative underrepresentation in the labor market suggest the next frontier for enterprise AI adoption.