GitHub updated its Copilot impact dashboard on 6 November 2026. The Agent adoption chart now includes Copilot Chat and the VS Code Agents window, taking it to nine tracked Copilot experiences.

What the changelog says

• The cohort once called “Passive users” is now “Chat-first users”: people active in Copilot who haven’t used a qualifying feature on at least two days in the 28-day window.
• GitHub’s reasoning, in its own words: chat is “a core Copilot experience, but the dashboard didn’t show it, and users who mainly use chat were labeled passive.”
• The usage metrics API gains chat and vscode_agent entries in enterprise and organisation 28-day reports. Earlier periods only show the original seven features.
• Adoption phases are unchanged: chat and the Agents window are reported as engagement but don’t count toward a user’s adoption phase.
• Visible to enterprise owners, billing managers, organisation owners and anyone with the View Copilot Metrics permission, provided the usage metrics policy is on.

The interpretation

This is a measurement story. Companies buying AI coding tools want to know whether developers are really using them, and the first version of the dashboard quietly labelled chat-heavy developers as passive. The fix is small, but it shows how easy it is to draw the wrong conclusion from AI adoption numbers.

Note the caveat: because chat includes agent mode, one person can appear under several features. Counts of “users” are not counts of different people.

So what

If you pay for AI coding tools, or your supplier says they use them, ask which measures prove it helps: delivery speed, review outcomes and defects, not just seat counts or activity. BuildApps reports on delivery, not tool usage. See AI-assisted development, custom software development, or start a project.

← All research