A much more likely scenario is that it's to hit some sort of internal metric, to have a certain percentage use of AI tools is a goal for management somewhere.

Yes this is exactly how Microsoft works. Every little metric is a KPI for someone. The little king of the hill for using @mention in teams. The king for using using the Edge shopping bar. The king for using the weather widget on the task bar.

And each of them seems to have free reign to Hassle the users as much as they can.

Or the flip side - copilot is an unorganized mess and feels way behind OpenAI. Maybe making people use it will put pressure to make it better. Windows NT -- David Cutler has a rule about eating your own dogfood. I don't think they eat enough of it at Microsoft anymore with the lack of build quality in the last few years when they laid off their big QA team.

Some of the stuff I've seen M365 Copilot do is just flat out broken and awful and it's presented in their enterprise (stable) channels.

My personal (probably unlikely) theory is that they plan to lay off a lot of staff anyway, so they wanna get them hooked and reliant on Copilot first so that they're lifelong customers wherever they go next

Then they must be playing 4D chess or something for as catastrophically shitty as the implementation is

Eating your own dogfood as they say is a great way to improve a product.

If that were true, they'd just open up copilot agent for general access for any open source project, otherwise their training data will skew toward Microsoft-centric interactions on Microsoft-centric languages and processes

I was going to offer the terraform or ansible organizations as examples, since I'd guess a lot of those bugfixes are rote work, but then realized there's no way Microsoft would assist IBM to ship products

Can't be qemu, given their recent no-slop policy, so maybe the idea is harder than I thought