What is Microsoft 365 Copilot — and should your business be using it?

If you’ve read anything about Microsoft 365 recently, you’ve almost certainly come across the word Copilot. Microsoft has been pushing it heavily — it’s in their marketing, their licensing conversations, their product roadmaps. But for most small and medium-sized business owners in Yorkshire, the honest question is a simple one: what actually is it, does it actually work, and is it actually worth paying for?

Here’s a plain-English answer.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant, built directly into the Microsoft 365 apps your business probably already uses — Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, and OneNote. It uses the same underlying technology as ChatGPT (both are built on large language models from OpenAI), but it’s specifically integrated with your Microsoft 365 environment, which means it can access your emails, documents, meetings, and calendar data to give you contextually relevant help.

In practical terms, it can do things like:

• Draft emails in Outlook based on a brief prompt from you
• Summarise a long Teams meeting that you missed or couldn’t follow in full
• Generate a first draft of a Word document from bullet points you provide
• Analyse data in an Excel spreadsheet and explain what it means in plain language
• Create a PowerPoint presentation from an existing Word document
• Answer questions about your own files: “find the quote we sent to Acme Ltd last month”

What does it cost?

This is where many small businesses pause. Microsoft 365 Copilot is an add-on licence on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription. At the time of writing, it costs £25.10 per user per month in the UK, added on top of whatever Microsoft 365 plan you’re already paying for.

For a ten-person business, that’s an additional £251 per month — or just over £3,000 per year — on top of existing Microsoft 365 costs. That’s not nothing, and it’s the main reason most Yorkshire SMEs we speak to are still in a “watching and waiting” position rather than committing to it.

There’s also a licensing requirement: to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, your users need to be on Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, or one of the enterprise E3/E5 plans. It isn’t available on the basic Business Essentials plan.

Does it actually work well?

Honestly — it depends heavily on how your Microsoft 365 environment is set up and how disciplined your team is with data.

Copilot is at its most impressive in businesses that already use Teams properly for meetings, store documents in SharePoint rather than local drives, and have a reasonably well-organised Microsoft 365 setup. In that environment, the meeting summaries are genuinely useful, the document drafting saves real time, and the ability to search across your whole business data in natural language is something that quickly becomes difficult to do without.

In businesses where files are scattered across local drives, Teams isn’t used consistently, and email is the primary way everything is communicated, Copilot delivers less impressive results because it has less well-organised data to draw on.

What are the security and data considerations?

This question comes up in almost every Copilot conversation we have with clients, and rightly so. The short answer is that Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn’t send your business data to train OpenAI’s models, and it inherits the same security and compliance controls as the rest of your Microsoft 365 environment.

What this means in practice: if a user doesn’t have permission to access a file, Copilot won’t surface it to them. Your data stays within your Microsoft 365 tenant. Microsoft processes the requests in their Azure infrastructure under the same data residency and compliance commitments that apply to the rest of your 365 environment.

There is, however, one important consideration: Copilot will surface documents and data that technically a user has access to, even if in practice they’ve never looked at them. If your permissions and sharing settings in SharePoint are loose — which is common in organisations that haven’t had a proper Microsoft 365 review — Copilot can expose information that people didn’t expect to be visible. Before rolling out Copilot, it’s worth having your permissions reviewed.

Should your business be using it?

There’s no single right answer, but here’s a straightforward framework for thinking about it.

You’re probably ready for Copilot if: you’re already on Business Premium or above, your team uses Teams and SharePoint as their primary tools, and you have staff for whom time spent on email, documents, and meetings is a meaningful chunk of their working day.

You’re probably not ready yet if: you’re on a basic Microsoft 365 plan, your SharePoint and file structure is disorganised, or you haven’t yet made full use of the capabilities already included in your current Microsoft 365 subscription. There’s a lot of value still to unlock in standard Microsoft 365 before Copilot is the right next step.

BOOM I.T. manage Microsoft 365 environments for businesses across Yorkshire — from initial setup and migrations through to ongoing management, security configuration, and licensing advice. If you want an honest conversation about whether Copilot makes sense for your business, or if your Microsoft 365 setup needs tidying up first, call us on 03333 660 005.