What Is Microsoft 365 Copilot and Is It Worth It for a Business?
Microsoft's AI assistant inside Word, Outlook, Teams and Excel, and the cleanup it needs first.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid add-on that brings an AI assistant into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, drawing on your organization's own emails, files and meetings to draft, summarize, analyze and answer questions. Whether it is worth it depends on the work your people do and on how well your data permissions are set up before you turn it on.
What it does well
- Summarizing long email threads and Teams meetings, with action items.
- Drafting documents and emails in your voice from a prompt or existing content.
- Answering "what did we decide about X" by searching across your files, chats and mail.
- First-pass analysis in Excel and first-draft presentations in PowerPoint.
The catch: it sees whatever the user can see
Copilot respects existing permissions, which sounds reassuring until you remember that most companies have years of over-shared SharePoint sites, "everyone" links and folders nobody has reviewed. Before Copilot, a user would have had to go looking. With Copilot, they can simply ask, and the salary spreadsheet someone shared too broadly in 2021 shows up in an answer. Readiness work is mostly permissions cleanup; see what is the principle of least privilege and SharePoint vs OneDrive.
Who gets value
People who live in email, meetings and documents: leadership, sales, project managers, professional services staff. Frontline roles and people who mainly use a line-of-business application see less benefit. Piloting with a small group before buying company-wide is the sensible approach.
Data handling
Microsoft 365 Copilot operates within the Microsoft 365 service boundary and, per Microsoft, does not use your business data to train its foundation models. It is a different product from the free consumer Copilot, which should not be used with company data.
Prerequisites
A qualifying Microsoft 365 plan, Copilot licenses per user, sensible sharing settings, and ideally sensitivity labels on your most sensitive content.
Mentis Group helps clients assess readiness, clean up permissions and pilot Copilot as part of Microsoft 365 support. See what is Microsoft 365 for business for the platform it sits on.
Have a question about your own environment? Schedule a consultation with Mentis Group or call (866) 901-7808.