Microsoft 365 Copilot: A Year On, Who Is It Actually For?

Microsoft 365 Copilot was the most anticipated enterprise software launch of 2023. The promise — AI integrated into the tools where hundreds of millions of knowledge workers actually spend their days, with access to the full context of their organisational data — was almost embarrassingly compelling. After a year of rolling out across enterprise customers, the product has delivered meaningful but uneven results.

The features that work well are those where the task is well-defined and the context is rich. Copilot in Teams meetings — which generates a real-time summary, suggests action items, and can answer questions about what was said earlier in the call — is the clearest productivity win. Users who attend many meetings report saving an hour or more per day on note-taking and follow-up preparation. The evidence here is hard to argue with.

Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is more variable. The ability to generate a first draft from a brief, or create a presentation from a document, is impressive and saves time. But the drafts require substantial editing — they are accurate but generic, lacking the institutional voice and specific argumentation that makes internal documents useful. This is a first draft tool, not a finished product tool, and adoption suffers when users expect otherwise.

The enterprise deployment challenges have been significant and are not fully resolved. Copilot’s access to organisational data through the Microsoft Graph means it can surface information that users have access to but may not have intended to share in a particular context. Several organisations have reported situations where Copilot volunteered sensitive information — salary data, internal conflict details, confidential project names — in responses to adjacent questions. The data governance implications require more careful planning than most IT teams anticipated.

Verdict: Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30 per user per month is worth the investment for organisations with heavy meeting loads and well-maintained SharePoint and Teams environments. It is not worth it for organisations whose Microsoft 365 data is poorly organised or where data governance has not been addressed — the tool’s access to organisational context is its greatest strength and its most significant risk.