Microsoft Copilot for business: what can you do with it?

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant for work. Microsoft Copilot for business connects language models to the apps you already use, such as Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and to the data you have in them: mail, calendar, chats, meetings and documents.

One point that causes confusion: the name has changed. As of October 2026, Microsoft’s own licensing documentation uses “Microsoft Copilot” and “Microsoft Copilot Chat” throughout, having moved on from the earlier “Microsoft 365 Copilot” and “Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat” names. Some pricing pages and the admin centre may still carry the older names during the changeover, but it’s the same product either way.

Copilot is one of several business assistants you can choose between. See a separate overview of AI tools on this site for how the categories compare. If your organisation works with Google Workspace, read about Gemini in Workspace instead; looking for a standalone assistant alongside Microsoft 365, ChatGPT for business and Claude for business are the common alternatives.

Licensing

The key question with a Copilot licence is which variant you mean. As of October 2026, Microsoft broadly distinguishes two tiers:

• Copilot Chat. According to Microsoft, available at no extra cost for organisations with an eligible Microsoft 365 plan. It’s mainly a chat that answers based on the web and on what you provide yourself, such as an uploaded file or pasted text. In Outlook, Copilot Chat can also work with your mailbox, calendar and meetings. Depending on your plan, you also get limited access to Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, without priority access at busy times.
• Microsoft Copilot (the paid licence). An add-on on top of your Microsoft 365 plan. Copilot can then reason across the full breadth of your work data, such as mail, chats, meetings, documents and sites, as far as the user has access to them. You also get priority capacity, the full Copilot experience in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and agents that work with your work data.

What the paid licence costs is on Microsoft’s pricing page. As of October 2026, per user per month, exclusive of VAT:

Microsoft Copilot Business is also available on monthly billing, at €21.84 per user per month. Microsoft also sells bundles of Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium with Copilot included. Which base plans qualify is listed in Microsoft’s licensing overview; for Copilot Business that includes Business Basic, Standard and Premium among others. Microsoft 365 E7 already includes Copilot, per the same overview.

Don’t budget for the licence alone. The biggest costs are often in preparing your data and in adoption. How to account for that honestly is covered separately on this site.

Applications in Microsoft 365

Copilot is strongest at work that already happens in Microsoft 365 and involves a lot of reading, searching or rewriting. A few examples by app, as Microsoft describes them in its own overview of Copilot:

• Outlook: drafting emails, summarising long email threads and getting tips on tone and clarity.
• Teams: transcribing and summarising meetings, including action items.
• Excel: analysing data, surfacing insights and help with formulas and charts.
• Word: drafting, rewriting and summarising documents.
• PowerPoint: building a presentation from an instruction or an existing document.

What these examples have in common: the output is a draft. Microsoft itself states that answers from generative AI aren’t guaranteed to be factually correct and that users need to check them. That takes skill. It helps if people know how to phrase an instruction; the basics are covered separately on this site under prompt engineering.

Conditions for your data

What Microsoft commits to, as of October 2026, according to Microsoft Copilot’s privacy documentation:

• No training on your data. Prompts, responses and data retrieved through Microsoft Graph aren’t used to train the underlying models.
• Only what the user can already see. Copilot only shows organisational data the user has at least read access to.
• EU Data Boundary. For users in the EU, traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary. Note: Anthropic’s models, which Microsoft offers within Copilot, currently fall outside that boundary according to the same page. As an admin, you decide yourself whether to allow those models.
• Storage and retention. Prompts and responses are stored under the same contractual terms as your other Microsoft 365 content. Admins can apply retention policies with Microsoft Purview.

The second point matters most in practice. Copilot doesn’t create new permissions, but it does make existing ones visible. A SharePoint site once opened to “everyone,” or a folder with salary data shared too broadly, suddenly surfaces in answers. Microsoft’s own setup guidance recommends reviewing where things are over-shared before rollout, using sensitivity labels, and checking the most-used sites first.

On top of that, your own groundwork still applies: record which data is and isn’t allowed in prompts, add Copilot to your data-processing register if personal data is involved, and assess whether a DPIA is needed.

First steps

Microsoft itself recommends a three-phase rollout: a pilot with a small group, then a broader rollout, then monitoring usage and adjusting. That’s a sensible order. Concretely:

1. See what you already have. Does everyone already have Copilot Chat? Then you can practise with that before buying licences.
2. Clean up access rights. Review shared sites and folders before the paid licence goes out broadly.
3. Choose a pilot group with real tasks. Not a casual trial, but a team with recognisable work and an agreed question the pilot needs to answer. Why that matters is covered separately on this site.
4. Train on the actual work. A generic demo helps little. A Copilot training session for teams that works with their own mail, documents and meetings delivers more.
5. Measure and decide. Microsoft offers usage reports in the admin centre. Use them to decide whether, and for whom, you expand licences.

That adoption takes more time than the technology is also visible in the case on an internal AI assistant for knowledge workers. I have no partner status with Microsoft and don’t earn anything from licences. Not sure whether Copilot fits your organisation, or how to approach the rollout? Book a thirty-minute call.