Microsoft Losing the AI Race?
We've Been Here Before.
“Copilot is soooo bad.” “Copilot is too slow.” “Copilot is overhyped.” “Copilot Cowork is too expensive”...
...Claude is so much better. No, ChatGPT is better, but Copilot is the worst.
Come one! This is the current mood on LinkedIn and it’s getting louder. It’s funny to see how “popular” it is to bash the giant, Microsoft, here on LinkedIn. Maybe it’s just my bubble, but I see so many posts every day about why Microsoft won’t win the AI race, why Claude or ChatGPT (and more) is better. People even pick up random headlines from newspapers and turn them into statements like “Even Microsoft is using Claude Code” or “Microsoft banned AI because it’s too expensive,” and so on. By the way, follow Chris McNulty, he’s doing a great job correcting the people trying to get attention on LinkedIn based on wrong information. 😁
I’m not here to defend every Microsoft decision. I’ve criticized plenty of them myself, and sometimes I think “why, Microsoft, why?” too, even though we obviously don’t see every single step they take. But I’ve watched this exact story play out before, and it didn’t end the way the critics expected.
It was called Teams, and before that, it was Slack who got to laugh. It was called Power Platform, and nobody could imagine switching from Nintex to it. But let’s look at 2026: Teams is the default way to collaborate and communicate. Power Platform is the automation engine where even business-critical processes run live and where your agents with Copilot Studio are built on top of it.
By the way I have even a bet ongoing that Microsoft is winning the “UI for AI” game. I’m more than convinced that I will win 😁
The Teams Playbook
Let’s go back to 2017/2018. I remember it well, a few weeks after I started my consultant journey, we decided to switch from Skype to Teams.
Microsoft Teams launched in 2017, Microsoft was late and reactive. Slack had already defined the category, already had the loyal user base, already had the Wired headline declaring
“Slack is so much better than Teams, organization won’t switch to Teams”
The criticism of Teams in its early years reads almost exactly like today’s Copilot criticism. Teams was called a Slack clone. The UI had, by widespread agreement,
“a lot of room for improvement.”
It was slow, and the search was bad. Power users in tech-forward startups wouldn’t touch it. Slack was the cool kid on the block.
Slack kept winning the developer crowd, the startups, the people who cared about elegance and speed. Microsoft kept being late, kept being clunky, kept getting mocked for it. And Teams won the enterprise anyway. By 2019, Teams had overtaken Slack in daily active users. Today, I’d assume that 95% of organizations use Teams as their communication platform (aaaand Outlook ;)).
The reason? That applies also to today’s AI journey: for large organizations, Teams inherited something Slack couldn’t easily match, the full Microsoft 365 compliance and governance surface, already built in, audited, and trusted by the people who have to sign off on enterprise software.
For enterprises, the platform approach with proper governance and security aspects was the big win, because missing features can be shipped. However, building a whole platform that’s well connected isn’t that easy, or shipped that fast.
The Power Platform Playbook Looked the Same
Before Teams, there was another round of this. Power Platform, Microsoft’s low-code suite for apps and workflows, showed up late to a category that Nintex and K2 already owned.
And I do know back in 2018 where I held the first CIE (Customer Immersion Experiences) Workshop with Microsoft Switzerland. It felt like Copilot in the first few months. Great slides, great storyline, but demoing was hard or let’s say challenging. But everyone in the room could feel and understand its potential.
For years, nobody could imagine switching. K2 and Nintex were the established choice for complex, multi-step enterprise workflows, deep process logic, on-premises deployment for organizations that needed it, the kind of flexibility Power Apps / Power Automate (or should I say Microsoft Flow 🤭) simply didn’t have in its early years. Power Platform was seen as the simpler, lighter tool, fine for small apps, not built for serious enterprise process automation.
That gap closed slower than Teams-versus-Slack, but it closed the same way. Microsoft kept building the platform underneath: deeper Microsoft 365 integration, more connectors, continuous updates tied to the broader ecosystem instead of a separate roadmap. Meanwhile, the legacy architecture on the other side started running out of road. Support for Nintex Workflow for Office 365 ended in December 2025, and Microsoft is retiring the SharePoint 2013 workflow engine in April 2026, the engine a lot of Nintex and K2 deployments still depend on (Peafowl IT Solution). Organizations that haven’t migrated are now forced to, not because Power Platform won the feature fight, but because the platform it’s part of kept evolving while the standalone tool didn’t.
Two products, two different timelines, same underlying reason Microsoft ended up on top.
What the Critics are Measuring
Here’s the pattern I keep seeing, then and now: critics measure speed, polish, and demo impressiveness. But keep in mind, enterprises measure something else entirely.
Stanford’s 2026 AI Index (Stanford HAI) makes this explicit. Security and risk, not technical limitations, not regulatory uncertainty, is now the number one barrier organizations cite for scaling AI agents. 62% name it as their primary blocker, a full 24 percentage points ahead of the next concern.
Look at what’s actually happening when AI moves fast without governance. In March 2026, an in-house agent at Meta posted incorrect technical information publicly without human approval, triggering two hours of unauthorized data exposure (TechCrunch). It was the second agent control failure at the company within weeks. Kiteworks’ 2026 Data Security and Compliance Risk Forecast Report found 63% of organizations can’t enforce purpose limitations on their AI agents, and 60% can’t even terminate a misbehaving agent once it’s running (Kiteworks).
So yes, other providers like Anthropic and OpenAI may ship features faster. The stability of the early days might be better too. But keep in mind: Claude and ChatGPT are mostly used at a consumer or private level, and they’re covering a few aspects of a full enterprise architecture.
That’s why Microsoft feels a bit slower or weaker in the beginning, but it’s integrative, and thanks to the Security Platform, Agent 365, Azure, Power Platform, Microsoft Graph, Work IQ, Foundry IQ, Fabric IQ, and of course Microsoft 365, it’s a whole platform.
What This Means for Microsoft
I’m not saying Microsoft is never slow for the wrong reasons. Sometimes it is, and sometimes “enterprise-ready” feels like an excuse, and I’m just thinking, come on, speed up a bit and improve quality.
But a meaningful share of what looks like Microsoft moving slowly is actually compliance and security work happening before a feature ships:
Copilot Cowork’s GA also meant that Microsoft shipped it with audit log, DSPM, eDiscovery, Insider Risk Management, and Communication Compliance. Everything built in, on GA day one. Compare this with other providers on the market, where it may be a bit faster.
Forrester predicts 60% of Fortune 100 companies will appoint a dedicated head of AI governance in 2026 (CIO Dive). Sony, Bank of America, and UBS already have. JPMorgan built its 450+ daily AI use cases governance-first, with a C-suite oversight council from day one (AIB Magazine).
The Nuance That Actually Matters
I’m not saying “Microsoft good, everyone else bad.” I am also a heavy Claude user for private reasons. But keep in mind that enterprises have other priorities.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing real innovation, and Microsoft’s multi-model strategy depends on that being true; Cowork runs on Anthropic models today precisely because Microsoft decided not to bet on a single model being good enough. (and OpenAI’s GPT5.5 is available in Copilot Cowork in Frontier as well)
Speed and the latest and greatest are super important, and if you’d ask me whether I want that in the Copilot platform too: 100%.
But sometimes being a bit slower is a feature, not just a bug. And that’s what I’m seeing at my customers, and also within our 400+ Campana & Schott Copilot and Agents projects: sometimes it’s hard and frustrating, but think of it as a long-term game. You won’t win the AI game because you were the very first. You’ll win it when you invest in your enterprise platform, your employees, and have a clear guidance on how to achieve this.
I know Microsoft won’t lose this race
I get why Microsoft-bashing is (and has been for the last couple of months) fun right now. It’s an easy story: the slow giant, the nimble challengers, the inevitable disruption.
I used to held CIE Workshops about Microsoft Flow back in 2018/2019, when demoing was still hard and I switched from Skype to Teams a few weeks into my consulting career, right when the “too slow, too clunky, already lost” narrative was loudest. I watched that narrative turn out to be wrong about the thing that actually mattered for enterprises.
I’d rather be early and right than loud and wrong. (Well, I’m loud for Copilot as well 😁)
That’s not a popular take on LinkedIn this month. I’m still making it. I am super convinced that Microsoft Copilot / Foundry is or will be the state-of-the-Art AI Platform for most organization. Copilot Premium is or will be our default way to interact with AI in the work environment and last but not least M365 Copilot Chat will be the enterprise UI for AI. The whole platform and development is just to strong. So I can’t wait to see the next announcements from Satya Nadella Charles Lamanna Judson Althoff and so on.
I’m excited - Let’s Copilot Your Day! 🔥