What Copilot genuinely does well
Where it earns the licence: drafting and reworking documents in Word from a brief; summarising the 200-email thread and drafting the reply in Outlook; catching you up on the Teams meeting you missed with action points; asking Excel questions in English and getting formulas back. For staff who live in documents, inboxes and meetings, the daily minutes saved are real. Where it underwhelms: light 365 users, heavily bespoke workflows, and anyone expecting it to know things outside your tenant's data. The per-user price is significant — which is why the honest rollout starts with a pilot of the heaviest document-and-email users, measured, before anyone licenses the whole company.
The prerequisite nobody mentions
Here's the sharp edge: Copilot answers using everything the asking user can access — so on a tenant with years of sloppy permissions, it becomes a cheerful search engine for files people were never meant to find ('summarise the directors' salary review' is a real horror story). Tenant hygiene is the prerequisite: permissions audited, sharing tightened, sensitive libraries locked — the exact work of our 365 tidy-up. Our rollout order is therefore fixed: secure the tenant, pilot the right users, measure, then scale or stop. We'll happily be the provider who tells you Copilot isn't worth it for you yet — that's what honest advice costs us and earns you.
Related: Managed IT (pillar) · Microsoft 365 · Email security · Cyber security
Frequently asked questions
How much does Copilot cost?
A meaningful per-user monthly fee on top of 365 — worth it for document-heavy roles, questionable for light users. We pilot and measure before company-wide spend.
Is Copilot safe with our company data?
Your data stays in your tenant and isn't used to train public models — but Copilot surfaces anything the user can already access, which is why permission hygiene comes first.
Can we trial it on a few people?
Yes — licensing is per user, monthly. A five-user pilot in the right department answers the value question in thirty days.