Having barely begun, could the race for AI customers already be lost for Microsoft?
It's probably still a little early to draw any definitive conclusions on the matter, but the fact remains that the position of Microsoft and its AI tool Copilot is worrying. First of all, however, the information published by Windows Latest needs to be qualified: the data taken into account here concerns only requests sent to the websites of the various artificial intelligences, and does not include requests linked to local applications alone.
| ChatGPT | Gemini | DeepSeek | Grok | Perplexity | Claude | Copilot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 2025 | 86.7% | 5.7% | - | - | 1.9% | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| June 2025 | 78.6% | 8.6% | 4.8% | 2.1% | 1.6% | 1.5% | 1.1% |
| September 2025 | 74.1% | 12.9% | 3.7% | 2.0% | 2.4% | 2.0% | 1.2% |
| December 2025 | 68.0% | 18.2% | 3.9% | 2.9% | 2.1% | 2.0% | 1.2% |
| January 2026 | 64.5% | 21.5% | 3.7% | 3.4% | 2.0% | 2.0% | 1.1% |
An important warning, of course, but it doesn't change the fact that the situation of Copilot - Microsoft's artificial intelligence - is not exactly enviable. As you'd expect, ChatGPT continues to hold a dominant position as a pioneer, but its market share has fallen sharply over the past year as a whole, from 86.7% of queries in January 2025 to "just" 64.5% at the beginning of this month. A year ago, the average user was barely aware of the existence of AIs other than ChatGPT. Since then, Gemini and Grok have been the talk of the town.
In fact, it's Gemini - Google's artificial intelligence - that's doing best of all: in January 2025, it barely emerged with a 5.7% market share, to occupy a more comfortable 21.5% today. But then, where is Copilot? Well, from last in January 2025, Microsoft's AI remains last in January 2026, but even more worryingly, its market share isn't increasing, at best it's stable: from 1.5% in January 2025, it dropped to 1.1% in June 2025 and then fluctuated between 1.1% and 1.2%... nothing to celebrate.
Of course, as we've already said, there's no way of assessing the audience for Copilot as a Windows 11 client. For Microsoft's part, let's hope that many users use this desktop client directly to make their requests, but there is one point that suggests that Copilot is not doing well: Microsoft's almost embarrassing lack of communication around Copilot, whereas its competitors, Gemini and Grok in particular, never fail to communicate their successes.
