GitHub Copilot Breaks 20 Million User Mark: A New Milestone in AI-Powered Coding!
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, an artificial intelligence (AI) coding tool, has surpassed 20 million users as per the announcement made by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. This figure represents all-time users, a spokesperson for GitHub confirmed.
In the past three months, approximately five million individuals have utilized GitHub Copilot for the first time. The tool had previously reached 15 million users as reported in April. However, Microsoft and GitHub do not disclose the number of these 20 million users who continue to employ the AI coding tool on a monthly or daily basis, although it is likely that such figures are considerably lower.
GitHub Copilot, one of the most widely used AI coding tools available today, is utilized by 90% of Fortune 100 companies, according to the company. The product’s growth among enterprise customers has increased by approximately 75% compared to the previous quarter, as reported by Microsoft.
AI coding tools are experiencing a surge in popularity and seem to be one of the few AI products generating substantial revenue. In 2024, Nadella stated that GitHub Copilot had surpassed the entire revenue generated by GitHub at the time of its acquisition by Microsoft in 2018. Since then, GitHub Copilot’s growth trajectory appears to have remained positive.
Despite having user bases that are comparatively minuscule compared to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, which attract hundreds of millions of users monthly, the world’s most popular AI coding tools still command a premium from software engineers and their employers. With Microsoft’s extensive list of enterprise customers and GitHub’s ecosystem of developers, GitHub Copilot is strategically poised to dominate the market for enterprise AI coding tools.
Cursor, another renowned AI coding tool, seeks to challenge GitHub Copilot in the enterprise market. To achieve this, Cursor has been acquiring talent from fledgling AI startups. In March, Cursor reportedly had more than a million people using its product daily, according to Bloomberg. Today, Cursor’s annualized recurring revenue (ARR) exceeds $500 million, indicating a significant increase in the number of daily users.
Although GitHub Copilot and Cursor initially focused on different aspects of the developer experience, they are increasingly converging into similar products. Both companies have recently introduced AI agents to review code and identify bugs introduced by humans. Additionally, both GitHub and Cursor are striving to create AI agents that automate programmer workflows, enabling developers to offload tasks entirely. During Wednesday’s earnings call, Nadella highlighted the significant momentum gained by GitHub’s AI coding agents.
Beyond Cursor, GitHub faces a plethora of well-capitalized competitors vying to sell AI coding tools to the enterprise. These include Google, which acquired the leaders of AI coding startup Windsurf, as well as Cognition, the maker of Devin that subsequently acquired the remainder of Windsurf’s team. Furthermore, OpenAI and Anthropic are both developing their own AI coding offerings powered by in-house AI models, Codex and Claude Code respectively, with the aim of capturing market share.
The emerging market is rapidly heating up to become one of AI’s most competitive sectors.
