Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

High-profile logo win for AI? Weeks ahead of year-end and with investors twitchy about returns? Impeccable timing

Microsoft yesterday used a town hall meeting to leak details tell staff about a 100,000 license contract signed with Barclays to use Copilot.

Or so says a report in Bloomberg, which quoted loquacious sources that asked for anonymity before they discussed comments they say were made by Microsoft's chief commercial officer Judson Althoff.

Althoff also told the town hall meeting about the multiple dozen other similarly sized agreements Microsoft has signed with customers that adopted Copilot, reportedly including Toyota, Volkswagen AG, Accenture, and Siemens AG.

Microsoft refused to comment when asked about the deal by The Register, as did Barclays and Accenture. We asked the other remaining corporations if they had anything to say, and - at the time of writing - only Siemens had confirmed its agreement.

At $30 per seat, these deals would equate to tens of millions of dollars in enterprise customer spending that Microsoft has managed to secure - a drop in the ocean when compared to the billions of dollars Microsoft has sunk into AI via investments in OpenAI, and the massive financial outlay on datacenters, forecast to be $80 billion in this calendar year alone.

Still, the timing of the information released at the town hall is impeccable, coming as Microsoft enters its final month of fiscal 2025 and around seven weeks before it makes public the profit and loss accounts for the financial year ending June 30.

Shareholders want to know that Microsoft is putting the money to good use, and some are itching to get a clear sense of the expected returns.

Jared Spataro, corporate veep of Modern Work & Business Applications at Microsoft previously tried to temper those expectations in March last year when he told the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom 2024 conference, that investors shouldn't expect quick returns.

He said Microsoft was spending time with customers "showing them and then helping them realize that value," which at $30 per month is "a substantial price tag for sure."

"People are definitely trying understand, who should I get this for? Is this for everyone in my organization? Is this for a certain segment or population? "And it's just based on hard facts. Are we saving enough in terms of time? Are we generating enough value? Previous Microsoft-commissioned research found Copilot testers worked 29 percent faster, and 77 percent that used it for two weeks found it indispensable."

Microsoft hasn't publicly confirmed how much money its standalone AI efforts are bringing in, nor the totality of customers that have bought licenses.

Barclays Bank says it employs 85,000 people across 40 countries, so the 100,000 seat agreement seems a bit top heavy; perhaps it also covers contractors or was set at that level to achieve a certain volume price reduction. Either way, it gives Barclays some wiggle room for headcount growth.

Securing Barclays would be a good look for Microsoft, it's a high profile logo. A source close to Microsoft told us they suspect the agreement was heavily discounted in terms of the price of the product and other aspects, such as services. "What is Barclays actually paying?" they asked.

Barclays already has a relationship with Microsoft and in 2022 agreed a multi-year deal for Teams, in and among the other Microsoft wares its uses including M365 and Security Solutions.

The customer wins for Microsoft come against the backdrop of some caution toward AI from enterprise customers, especially around security and corporate governance. Jack Berkowitz, chief data officer of Securiti, told us last summer that security and oversight concerns are commonplace.

"Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to," he said.

Gartner estimated in July last year that at least 30 percent of GenAI projects are going to be ditched after the proof of concept phase by the end of 2025, and it said in September: "It is really easy to waste money on generative AI," as "500 to 1,000 percent errors of AI cost estimates are possible."

Equinix president and CEO Adaire Fox-Martin said at Citi's 2024 Global Technology Media and Telecom Conference in September last year: "From my conversations with our customers, many of them are working through the business case, the actual business value that taking this proof of concept into production will release for them."

Fox-Martin added: "And they're not always easy business cases to resolve. My take is that it will be a 12 to 18-month journey before we see the significant impact of that."

As for its agreement with Microsoft, Siemens said it has bought Copilot for Office licenses for some but not all of its employees. A spokesperson at Siemens told us some staff have access to Microsoft Copilot internally and are being encouraged to use it daily. ®