Copilot vs. a Real AI Assistant: What Microsoft Won't Tell You

Andrew pushes back on amaiko's Copilot critique with real success stories — Lloyds Banking Group's 93% daily usage, Investec saving bankers 200 hours a year, and Microsoft's 160% year-over-year seat growth. amaiko explains why enterprise wins don't translate to mid-market reality, why Copilot's memory feature is architecturally different from true persistent memory, and why the July 2026 price increase changes the math for every M365 customer.

Topics discussed

• Lloyds Banking Group: 30,000 seats, 93% daily usage — and the thousand-coach change management effort behind it
• 15 million paid Copilot seats vs. 450 million M365 users: 3.3% conversion after two years
• Recon Analytics: 70% of users initially preferred Copilot, only 8% kept choosing it after trying alternatives
• Microsoft's July 2026 price hike: M365 E3 from $36 to $42, on top of the $30/month Copilot add-on
• Copilot Memory feature: shipped late 2025, widely reported as inconsistent — retrieval-first vs. memory-first architecture
• Memory poisoning attacks: Palo Alto Unit 42 research on persistent memory as an attack vector in AI agents
• Privacy risks of AI that remembers: TechPolicy Press analysis, the case for transparency and user control
• Copilot Studio: GPT-5, MCP support, 1,400 connectors — but an MVP reviewer calls it "a platform of contradictions"
• SamExpert: enterprise CFOs still cannot convert Copilot time savings into financial ROI

Full article: amaiko.ai/blog/copilot-vs-real-assistant

Sources cited: Microsoft FY26 Q2 Earnings, Lloyds Banking Group/Microsoft, Recon Analytics, The Register, Gartner 2025 Digital Worker Survey, SamExpert, Forrester, Investec/Microsoft, Palo Alto Unit 42, TechPolicy Press, Ragnar Heil (Copilot Studio MVP review), Mary Jo Foley/Directions on Microsoft