Microsoft’s AI coding tool GitHub Copilot hits 20 million users  | Technology News

In their previous quarter, they reported that their all-time users were 15 million, which indicates that over five million people tried GitHub in the last three months. Microsoft and GitHub don’t display figures for many of the 20 million users who continue to use this AI coding tool daily. 

Nadella also mentioned that GitHub Copilot was a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018. In the year since, it seems GitHub Copilot’s growth rate has continued in a positive direction.  And AI coding tools are rising in popularity, and they seem to be one of the few AI products generating notable revenue. 

Compared to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, that has a user base of a hundred million users, on the contrary, these AI coding tools might have a tiny user base. The only reason is quite simple: software engineering is more niche compared to general information queries. 

Software engineers and their employers seem to be paying a premium for AI coding tools to increase their productivity and efficiency.  Microsoft’s long list of enterprise customers and GitHub are attracting this community of code developers. GitHub has positioned itself well to dominate the market for AI coding tools.

Another well-known AI coding tool, Cursor, has been acquiring expertise from upstart AI businesses to compete with GitHub Copilot in the enterprise market. In March, reports from Bloomberg claimed that over a million people were using Cursor’s software daily. The company’s annualised recurring revenue at the time was around $200 million. The fact that Cursor’s ARR is over $500 million today indicates that a lot more people are using its goods daily.

Initially, both these AI coding tool companies were developing different tools to tackle different developers, but with the passing of time, they have started to converge into similar product development. 

 Their current biggest similarity is launching AI agents to review code and catch bugs that have been written or developed by Humans. And now both GitHub and Cursors’ next goals are creating AI agents that create automated programmer workflows, which helps the developers drop all the tasks together. And Microsoft’s CEO also added that GitHub was seeing great momentum with their AI coding agents.

Cursor is not the only competitor in the market for GitHub; the other well-capitalised competitors are also creating a dent in the AI coding tools market. 

And in recent times, Google has bought the founders of the AI coding business Windsurf, and Cognition, which created Devin and later bought the rest of Windsurf’s staff. Not to add that to capture the market, OpenAI and Anthropic are developing their own AI coding products using internal AI models, Codex and Claude Code, respectively.