Microsoft 365 Copilot: what it costs and what it is actually good for

Microsoft 365 Copilot puts an AI assistant inside Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and PowerPoint. It is licensed per user per month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 plan, at a price point that means a business of ten pays a meaningful annual sum for it. So the honest question is not whether it is clever. It is where it pays for itself.

Where it genuinely earns its keep

• Meeting recap in Teams: joins the meeting, produces notes, decisions and action items. For staff in back-to-back meetings this alone can justify the licence.
• Email triage and drafting in Outlook: summarise a long thread, draft a reply in your tone, done in seconds.
• First drafts in Word: proposals, policies and letters start at 70 percent instead of zero.
• Asking questions across your own files: "what did we quote this client last year" answered from documents you already have.

Where it disappoints

Excel is the weakest surface for most small businesses: it helps with formulas and summaries but is not the analyst it sounds like. And Copilot is only as good as your data hygiene. If your SharePoint is a mess, Copilot confidently surfaces the mess, including files people perhaps should not see. Permissions need reviewing before rollout, not after.

The sensible way to adopt it

Do not licence everyone. Pick the three to five people who live in meetings and email, run a 60 to 90 day trial, and measure honestly: hours saved per week, in their words. Expand if the numbers are real, stop if they are not. And put a one-page AI usage policy in place first, covering what data can and cannot go into any AI tool.

Copilot is not the only option

For some workflows, a small custom tool aimed at one repetitive job beats a general assistant, and it is often what we build for clients: automation that removes a specific hour of busywork every day. As an AI-native provider we are happy to tell you which of the two your problem actually needs. Book a free IT review and bring your most annoying recurring task.