“Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. Thirty dollars a seat, per month. A neat, board-pleasing line item of around $1.4 million a year.”
The punchline in security engineer Peter Girnus’s now-viral, satirical post is not the spend, but what followed.
Three months in, usage reports showed just 47 employees had opened Copilot, only 12 had used it more than once, and Girnus himself mostly used it to summarise emails he could have read faster on his own, while also fixing hallucinations.
The project was still declared a “pilot success”, carried forward by familiar phrases such as “digital transformation” and “10x productivity”, even as day-to-day reality looked closer to a stalled experiment than a breakthrough in workplace AI.
It is into this gap between promise and practice that Microsoft has introduced its new “Frontier Firms” narrative, with four of the world’s largest IT services companies—Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro—now positioned as flagship examples.
In Bengaluru on December 11, Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announced strategic partnerships with the four companies, under which each will deploy more than 50,000 Microsoft Copilot licences, collectively crossing two lakh seats.
Microsoft said this would “set a new benchmark for enterprise-scale AI adoption.”
Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India & South Asia, described the companies as organisations “moving beyond experimentation to full-scale deployment,” embedding Copilot into everyday work and “setting the global pace” on agentic AI.
‘Frontier Firms’
The firms are explicitly labelled “Frontier Firms”, enterprises that redesign workflows around human-agent collaboration across delivery, sales, finance, HR and customer engagement.
Each company, however, presents a different picture of what that frontier looks like.
Cognizant, which Microsoft has positioned as “client zero” for Copilot, has tied the partnership to its identity as an “AI builder company.”
CEO Ravi Kumar S has said Cognizant’s role is to bridge “hundreds of billions” of dollars in AI infrastructure investment with real business value, using Copilot and agentic solutions to rewire how organisations access data and make decisions.
Infosys, which Microsoft calls one of the world’s largest Copilot deployments, is integrating Microsoft’s Intelligence Layer with its own Topaz Fabric and Cobalt platforms to operationalise “multi-agent workflows” and a “human+agent powered AI-first enterprise,” according to CEO Salil Parekh.
TCS is using Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot internally across sales, HR and finance, equipping tens of thousands of employees with AI tools, while running a company-wide hackathon involving over 2.81 lakh participants and providing all employees with a personalised AI coach, CEO K Krithivasan has said.
Wipro, through a three-year strategic partnership and a Microsoft Innovation Hub at its Bengaluru Partner Labs, is embedding Copilot and agentic AI into Wipro Intelligence, with CEO Srini Pallia saying the collaboration is reshaping how enterprises work, and accelerating adoption across sectors including financial services and healthcare.
For Indian IT, which has spent the past year positioning itself as the global delivery engine for enterprise AI, the “Frontier Firm” label is both an endorsement and a test.
Lowered Growth Expectations
These companies have large internal workforces to deploy copilots at scale, deep client relationships, and long experience in managing technology change.
On paper, that makes Microsoft’s choice of reference customers logical, and the scale, over two lakh Copilot licences, places them among the largest real-world testbeds for agentic workflows.
The unresolved question, however, is whether these deployments translate into deep, sustained usage, or whether some will echo the Girnus experience of expensive licences with limited everyday impact.
Microsoft did not respond to questions from AIM, probing whether Copilot’s enterprise deployments translate into sustained, everyday usage and measurable return on investment, or remain headline-driven rollouts that struggle to deliver real value after launch.
TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys did not respond either to queries whether “Frontier Firm” Copilot deployments translate into actual usage, use cases, and measurable productivity or delivery impact, rather than announced scale or partnership optics.
The unresolved question has sharpened as Microsoft itself has moderated expectations around enterprise spending on AI agents.
Entering 2025, executives had positioned the year as a turning point in which autonomous agents would move from demos into production budgets.
But, according to a report by The Information, followed by television and wire coverage, several Microsoft divisions lowered internal growth expectations for newer AI offerings after many Azure sales teams missed sales-growth goals for the fiscal year ended June.
In one US Azure unit, a target to grow customer spending on the Foundry service by 50% was met by fewer than one-fifth of sales staff, prompting a reduction in the growth target to about 25% for the current fiscal year; another unit cut an earlier goal of doubling Foundry sales to a 50% growth target.
Microsoft said that “aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered,” arguing that some reporting had confused internal planning targets with compensation-linked quotas.
Copilot Versus Cursor
However, Microsoft’s Copilot family of AI assistants surpassed 100 million monthly active users across commercial and consumer versions in FY2025, according to the company’s annual report. Copilot Studio is now used by more than 230,000 organisations to build custom agents and GitHub Copilot has reached over 20 million users as a peer programmer for software development.
That is where the “Frontier Firms” idea will ultimately be tested. For Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro, Copilot deployments are framed as both internal transformation and proof-points for clients.
The decisive evidence will come not from announcements or licence counts, but from engineers, consultants and delivery teams who use these tools daily.
P S Ranjith Kumar, VP of AI & tech at Khetika, an Indian healthy food brand, said he switched to Cursor for its convenience and deeper contextual understanding.
“Cursor understands the entire repository as context, while Copilot mostly reacts to the current file or cursor position,” he explained.
To him, Cursor feels like a true pair programmer, whereas Copilot often comes across as an intelligent autocomplete tool.
He added that Cursor’s key strength lies in being built from the ground up around AI, unlike Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, which in his view remains “a traditional editor with AI bolted on.”
Worst Thing to Happen?
Jon Pressnell, a partner at Blue Point Capital Partners and self-described AI evangelist, declared on LinkedIn two months ago that “Microsoft Copilot is the worst thing to happen to enterprise AI adoption,” citing sky-high hype undone by disappointed customers, wasted budgets, and eroded industry trust.
He pointed to low usage rates in deployments “gathering dust,” security and governance fears around data privacy, high licensing costs paired with inconsistent performance and dubious ROI, and a resulting “Copilot fatigue” that has bred market skepticism toward all enterprise AI services, even as industry leaders voice public frustration.
Pressnell ended with a half-question: “Is Copilot really the worst thing to happen to enterprise AI, or am I just bitter because I thought we would get the product they demoed?”
Replying to Pressnell, Debasish Bhattacharjee, director of engineering and operations (AI) at SAP, said Copilot’s real sin isn’t bad performance, it’s teaching enterprises that AI adoption can skip proper change management.
“We see 80% better results when teams start with narrow, measurable AI pilots rather than company-wide rollouts,” he shared.
Copilot Seeks Comprehensive Adoption
Edyta Gorzoń, a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and Copilot adoption specialist, outlined two recurring challenges she hears from enterprise customers implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot. The first is “cautious investment” — companies buy a small set of licenses (10–20 for organisations with 100+ employees) to pilot the tool, but then get stuck when few users actively use it, or when dashboards show low engagement.
Gorzoń said assigning licenses alone doesn’t drive adoption; organisations need to study user behaviour, identify repetitive tasks, run pilot studies, and align expected ROI with business goals before scaling.
The second is “ineffective training” — clients assume a few standard training sessions will increase usage, but see little change.
She explained that Copilot adoption requires more than training; it demands cultural and behavioural change management, building internal “Copilot Champion” networks, ongoing communication, and contextual learning.
Without a comprehensive adoption strategy, she warned, investments in Copilot licenses are unlikely to pay off or deliver measurable returns.
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