Microsoft 365 Copilot puts an AI assistant inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and PowerPoint, working with your own emails, documents and meetings. For the right people it saves real time every week. For others it’s an expensive extra they rarely open. At the time of writing it costs around £16 per user per month on top of your Microsoft 365 licence for small businesses, so it’s worth testing before buying it for everyone. Here’s how to decide.
What Copilot is good at
- Meetings. Summaries of Teams meetings, with actions and decisions, and answers to “what did I miss?”
- Email. Summarising long threads, drafting replies and catching up after time off.
- First drafts. Proposals, reports and letters drafted from your own notes and documents.
- Finding things. “Where’s the latest version of the Smith proposal?” or “What did we agree with this supplier on pricing?”
- Excel. Explaining data, suggesting formulas and spotting trends in a table.
Where it’s less useful
- Staff who rarely use email, documents or Teams, such as field and warehouse teams.
- Highly specialised work in other software it can’t see.
- Anything where an answer must be exactly right without checking. Copilot can be confidently wrong, so its output always needs a human eye.
Who usually gets the most from it
People who spend most of their day in email, meetings and documents: directors, managers, account managers, administrators and anyone writing a lot of proposals or reports. As a rough test, if someone spends several hours a week summarising, drafting or searching for information, Copilot has a good chance of paying for itself.
The work to do before switching it on
Copilot can see everything the person using it can see. In most businesses, that’s more than anyone realises: a SharePoint site shared with “everyone”, an old HR folder with open permissions, a salary spreadsheet in someone’s OneDrive shared by link. Copilot doesn’t create these problems, but it makes them much easier to stumble on.
- Review sharing. Find sites, folders and files shared more widely than they should be, and tighten them.
- Label sensitive data. Sensitivity labels (in Business Premium) help protect payroll, HR and client files.
- Write a simple AI use policy. Which AI tools are approved, what must never be pasted into unapproved ones, and that people check AI output before relying on it.
- Get licensing right. Copilot requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan. See our comparison of Business Standard and Premium.
Run a pilot, not a rollout
- Choose three to five people who use email, meetings and documents heavily, and who are curious about AI.
- Give them a short session on prompts for their actual job.
- Ask them to note time saved, roughly, for a month.
- Review: keep Copilot for the people who saved meaningful time, and drop it for the rest.
A month is usually enough to see whether it’s worth extending.
Prompts that work
Copilot gives better answers when you give it context and a clear job. A few examples to try in a pilot:
- “Summarise this email thread and list the actions for me, with dates.”
- “Draft a reply declining this request politely, and offer a call next week.”
- “Using the notes in the attached document, draft a one-page proposal for a client in the format of our last proposal.”
- “From today’s meeting transcript, list the decisions made and who owns each action.”
- “Explain the trends in this sales table and highlight the three biggest changes since last quarter.”
Always read the result before using it. Treat Copilot as a fast first draft, not a final answer.
Free alternatives to try first
Microsoft includes Copilot Chat, a web-based AI assistant with enterprise data protection, for Microsoft 365 business users. It doesn’t work inside your emails and documents the way the paid Copilot does, but it’s a safe way for staff to try AI for drafting and research without pasting business data into consumer tools.
Beyond Copilot
Some of the biggest time savings come from automating repetitive processes, not from an assistant: invoices read and filed automatically, new starters set up from a single form, weekly reports gathered without copy and paste. Our AI and automation service covers both, set up securely in your Microsoft 365.
Talk to us about a Copilot pilot, and we’ll check your permissions are ready first.