How We Use AI Assistants: Microsoft’s 2025 Copilot Study Reveals Our Digital Companions
Microsoft has unveiled a comprehensive analysis of how people are integrating AI assistants into their daily lives, offering fascinating insights into our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence. The study, titled “It’s About Time: The Copilot Usage Report 2025,” examined 37.5 million anonymous Copilot conversations from January through September 2025, carefully excluding enterprise and educational accounts to focus on personal usage patterns. What emerged is a portrait of AI as a digital companion that serves distinctly different roles depending on when and how we interact with it. The research team, which included Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, used machine learning to categorize conversations by topic and intent while preserving user privacy, with no human reviewers accessing the actual conversations.
Perhaps the most striking finding is how our device choice shapes our relationship with AI. On desktop computers, Copilot functions primarily as a professional assistant, with “Work and Career” displacing “Technology” as the dominant topic during traditional business hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This pattern reflects how seamlessly AI has integrated into our professional routines, becoming a virtual colleague that helps us navigate work challenges, technical problems, and educational queries. The desktop usage pattern follows a predictable rhythm that mirrors the traditional workday—rising sharply in the morning, maintaining steady engagement throughout business hours, and tapering off in the evening as users disconnect from professional responsibilities. Science and education-related topics follow similar patterns, highlighting how AI has become an extension of our professional toolkit.
Mobile usage reveals a completely different relationship with AI assistants—one that’s surprisingly intimate and consistent. “Health and Fitness” paired with information-seeking dominated mobile interactions throughout the entire day, maintaining its top position regardless of the hour. This suggests that people are increasingly turning to AI on their phones as a private health consultant and personal advisor. Unlike desktop usage with its clear business-hour peaks, mobile health queries remain consistent around the clock, underscoring how smartphones have created a space for continuous, private consultation about our most personal concerns. As Microsoft notes in the study, users appear to be engaging with “a single system in two ways: a colleague at their desk and a confidant in their pocket,” revealing the dual nature of our AI relationships.
The research also documents a significant evolution in how we use AI assistants over time. Between January and September 2025, programming-related conversations declined while cultural and historical topics increased substantially. This shift suggests that AI assistants are no longer primarily the domain of technical early adopters but are increasingly embraced by mainstream users for a broader range of everyday purposes. People are moving beyond using AI merely for technical assistance and are increasingly integrating it into their cultural explorations, creative pursuits, and personal growth activities. This democratization of AI usage parallels findings from OpenAI and Anthropic, which also reported their users employing ChatGPT and Claude for practical guidance, information gathering, and writing assistance across various aspects of their lives.
Perhaps most thought-provoking is the rise in advice-seeking behaviors, particularly around personal topics. Users aren’t just asking Copilot for information or requesting it to complete tasks—they’re increasingly soliciting its guidance on decisions that affect their lives. This evolving usage pattern suggests that AI assistants are transitioning from tools that simply execute commands to trusted advisors that help shape our choices and behaviors. As Microsoft noted in their companion blog post, Copilot “is way more than a tool: it’s a vital companion for life’s big and small moments.” This shift raises important questions about the responsibility AI developers bear as their creations increasingly influence human decision-making, potentially elevating concerns around accuracy, reliability, and the ethical dimensions of AI guidance.
The Microsoft study ultimately reveals how rapidly AI assistants are becoming integrated into the fabric of our daily existence—not as novelties or mere productivity tools but as persistent digital companions that adapt to different contexts and needs. The dual nature of these relationships—professional on desktop, personal on mobile—highlights how we’re developing nuanced expectations for AI interaction based on our physical context and immediate needs. As AI continues to evolve from a specialized technology into an everyday companion, we’re witnessing the emergence of a new kind of human-computer relationship: one where AI isn’t just responding to our queries but participating in our daily rhythms, supporting our work, addressing our concerns, and increasingly helping us navigate life’s complexities. This transformation suggests we’re moving toward a future where AI assistants become so deeply woven into our routines that they function less as external tools and more as natural extensions of our cognitive and decision-making processes.
