4 days ago
GitHub Copilot users surpass 20 million as AI tools surge in demand
GitHub Copilot now reports more than 20 million users and widespread adoption by over 90 percent of the Fortune 100, reflecting growing demand for AI-enhanced development tools across the software industry.
The figures, shared as part of Microsoft's Q4 FY25 earnings update, show a significant increase from the previous quarter, where user numbers stood at 15 million. The platform also highlighted that its Copilot Enterprise customer base increased 75 percent quarter-over-quarter.
Growth and adoption
AI-enabled projects on GitHub have more than doubled over the past year. The GitHub Code Review agent is now used to perform millions of code reviews each month on the platform, indicating sustained engagement from both new and existing users.
The release of new features over recent months, including a fully autonomous coding agent, has aimed to expand options for developers to automate routine coding jobs. This tool is designed to allow programmers to assign low- to medium-complexity tasks or issues and monitor their completion through GitHub's pull request system, with comprehensive security measures in place.
How the coding agent works
Developers can assign an issue to Copilot, either via the web, mobile, or the GitHub CLI, as they would a team member. The agent then initiates a secure development environment using GitHub Actions, applies a retrieval augmented generation method powered by GitHub code search, and pushes progress to a draft pull request. Every action taken by the agent is logged, providing insight into the agent's decision-making process.
Additional security controls ensure that any code proposed by the agent must be reviewed and approved before integration. Existing policies such as branch protections remain intact, and any deployment workflows are only triggered after human approval.
The autonomous coding agent uses vision models to interpret images attached to issues, such as screenshots or mockups, and can access additional context and data through GitHub's Model Context Protocol (MCP). This allows it to adapt to a variety of coding standards and requirements within different repositories. The Copilot coding agent is opening up doors for human developers to have their own agent-driven team, all working in parallel to amplify their work. We're now able to assign tasks that would typically detract from deeper, more complex work - allowing developers to focus on high-value coding tasks. - James Zabinski, DevEx Lead at EY
The Copilot coding agent is available to Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ customers, with support extended to a range of development environments including Xcode, Eclipse, JetBrains, and Visual Studio from June 2025.
Developer feedback The GitHub Copilot coding agent fits into our existing workflow and converts specifications to production code in minutes. This increases our velocity and enables our team to channel their energy toward higher-level creative work. - Alex Devkar, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Analytics, Carvana
The new coding agent is designed to respect organisational policies and rulesets. It is limited to interacting only with branches it creates, and any required code reviews or approvals set within a repository remain in effect. Its internet access is also limited to a configurable list of trusted destinations.
Company perspective GitHub Copilot has crossed 20 million users – up more than 5 million from last quarter. We're also seeing explosive AI growth on GitHub, with AI projects more than doubling over the past year. And it's all because of grit. It's no secret the market Copilot introduced has heated up. Over the past year, incredible startups and founders have built and scaled great products that found real traction. The true measure of a company is never drawn during its hype wave, but by its resilience when pressure tested. Hubbers across GitHub put their heads down, treated pressure as a privilege, and we innovated. This past year, we shipped over 230 updates to GitHub Copilot – becoming the first multi-model solution at Microsoft, in partnership with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. We enabled Copilot Free for millions and introduced the synchronous agent mode in VS Code, all the way to Spark and the coding agent native to GitHub. I could not be more proud of my colleagues. Even with all the constraints we've faced, we proved that a little grit wins the game. - Thomas Dohmke, CEO at GitHub
GitHub has stated its intention to continue expanding features to provide developers with increased flexibility and efficiency, promising further updates over the coming months.
