What each Copilot licence covers

Copilot is the icon that now appears across Microsoft 365, and the chat window that opens when you click it. Many people open it to ask a question or tidy a paragraph.

The name covers more than one product, and what Copilot can reach and do depends on the licence behind it. Microsoft also changes the names and the features often.

1What Copilot is

Copilot is Microsoft's name for its AI assistant. At work, people sign in with the firm's Microsoft account, and Microsoft applies what it calls enterprise data protection: prompts and responses are covered by the same contractual terms as the firm's email in Exchange and its files in SharePoint. Under that protection, Microsoft says prompts and responses are not used to train foundation models.

Microsoft also offers Copilot for personal use, signed in with a personal Microsoft account. When a work file is opened with Copilot from a home Microsoft 365 plan, Microsoft says it can work with the open document but can't see the firm's other files, and file access stays tied to the work account. The firm's administrator can switch that off.

2How Copilot spread

Copilot first reached Microsoft's everyday products in February 2023, when the company launched a new Bing search engine and Edge browser with AI built in, and described them as "an AI copilot for the web". Later that year it brought Copilot to its work apps, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 became generally available to enterprise customers on 1 November 2023.

In January 2024, Microsoft removed the 300-seat purchase minimum, so firms on Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Business Premium could buy it. In January 2025 it introduced Copilot Chat, a web-grounded chat with enterprise data protection, alongside the paid version grounded in a person's meetings, emails, chats and documents.

By November 2025, Microsoft was including Copilot Chat in eligible Microsoft 365 subscriptions at no extra charge, and Microsoft announced Copilot Business for smaller organisations, available from December. Microsoft has since renamed the chat app Microsoft Copilot Chat.

3The versions of Copilot

Microsoft's own comparison sets out three levels for people signed in with a work account. When a person signs in to Copilot at work, Microsoft shows them a label for the level they are on.

• Copilot Chat (Basic). Secure chat grounded in web data, which comes with qualifying Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions. It can't use the firm's data through Microsoft Graph, so a person uploads a file with the prompt, works with content open in Teams or Outlook, or uses a pay-as-you-go agent. At this level there is no Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote.

• M365 Copilot (Basic). The same web-grounded chat, plus standard access to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

• M365 Copilot (Premium). The paid add-on licence. It draws on web data and work data, and "pulls information automatically" from the person's meetings, emails, chats and files. It comes with priority access to the full experience in the apps, and with agents that use work data, such as Researcher and Analyst.

For organisations with up to 300 users, Microsoft sells the paid licence as Copilot Business. It can be added to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard or Business Premium, or bought as part of Business Standard or Business Premium plans with Copilot included. Microsoft says it has the same capabilities as the enterprise licence.

Where Copilot is available in Word, Microsoft's guidance asks people to verify "facts, numbers, citations, names, policy statements" before sharing, and says the person using it is responsible for "deciding whether to keep, revise, or remove" what Copilot wrote. Human in the loop looks at where that checking sits in a firm's work.

4Chat and search

In the 2025 Victorian Lawyer Census, 37% of the 1,739 lawyers who answered the question reported using AI in their work. Of those, 65% used general-purpose tools and 34% used Microsoft 365 Copilot. In CPA Australia's Business Technology Report 2025, 35% of the 252 Australian accounting and finance professionals surveyed said AI is used occasionally in their business, "mainly through free or off-the-shelf tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot".

The Reserve Bank heard from 105 medium to large firms in its liaison program and found adoption "is typically limited to digital assistants such as Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT", used "for discrete tasks such as summarising emails and undertaking research". In an Australian National University survey of 3,577 Australian adults, searching for information and facts was the most frequent use of generative AI at work and at home, followed by writing communications.

Microsoft's own analysis, a working paper not yet peer reviewed, looked at 175,274 Copilot Chat prompts from one week in February 2026. Asking for information and refining content made up almost 60% of them. In a separate sample of more than 5.3 million prompts from June to September 2025, the same researchers found requests for information falling from 38% to 33% of the total, and content refinement rising from under 22% to 28.5%.

In firms, what we tend to see is Copilot opened as a chat or search tool, with the features inside Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel getting less use.

In the Australian Government's 2024 Copilot trial, which ran across more than 50 agencies, 72% of respondents used Copilot to summarise Teams meetings and 71% to summarise or rewrite in Word. Fewer used it to draft in Outlook (43%), create content in PowerPoint (33%) or analyse data in Excel (20%). In focus groups, participants said they often forgot Copilot was available inside the apps, because it was not obvious in the interface. The trial is foundational research from 2024, and Microsoft has since changed how Copilot appears in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with a single Copilot button anchored in the corner of the document.

5Copilot in Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel

Sorting email. In Outlook for Microsoft 365, Prioritize my inbox gives incoming email a high, normal or low priority, based on who is on the thread, their job titles and what the email says. When a prioritised message is opened, Copilot shows a few lines explaining why. It only sorts mail that arrives after the feature is switched on, and Microsoft is rolling it out gradually.

Writing email. Copilot can draft a new message, a reply or a forward from a short prompt, and the draft can be made shorter, longer or a different tone before it is kept. It can also summarise a long thread, such as a back and forth about a disputed invoice, with numbered citations linking to the messages it drew on, and offer coaching on a draft before it goes.

PowerPoint. In PowerPoint's Agent Mode, a person describes the presentation they need, and Copilot may ask about the audience and the style they want before building the slides. Microsoft says support for referencing files is coming to Agent Mode. Separately, Copilot can create a presentation from a Word document. Microsoft recommends organising the document with Word's styles, and says Copilot works best with documents under 24 MB. A client seminar written up in Word can become a first set of slides.

Excel. Copilot in Excel can apply formulas across multiple sheets and summarise data. Ask it a question about the data and it shows the answer as charts, PivotTables, summaries, trends or outliers, and it can sort, filter and apply conditional formatting. For an accounts team, that could be a debtors list sorted by age, with the outliers flagged.

The COPILOT function, a formula Microsoft offered in preview, was withdrawn on 14 September 2026. Microsoft's Excel guidance says Copilot "can sometimes make mistakes", and asks people to review and verify what it creates before relying on it.

6What comes with the plan

If the firm runs on Microsoft 365, some of this comes with the plan. Microsoft says Copilot Chat comes with qualifying Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, and lists Copilot in Outlook as included with or without the paid licence. A qualifying business subscription is also one of the ways to get Copilot in Excel. What each level costs is set out in reviewing your AI subscriptions, along with how to list the firm's AI spending.

The practice management system, the document system and the accounting package can carry AI features too, sometimes inside a licence the firm already holds.

7Copilot training by feature and role

In the same Australian Government trial, run by the Digital Transformation Agency, 75% of participants who had three or more forms of training felt confident using Copilot, 28 percentage points more than those with one form. The trial shows the two go together, but it can't show which caused the other.

In the UK, the Department for Work and Pensions found 89% of the 3,549 people in its Copilot trial learned by exploring on their own, and most could not remember attending a formal session. They asked for shorter sessions on one feature at a time, and for sessions with people in similar roles.

The firm decides which licences go to whom, which features are switched on and what can go into the tool. Copilot training starts from those decisions. Each person finds out which Copilot they have and what it can reach. Each team learns the one or two features that suit its daily work, practises them on its own kind of documents, and learns the check that goes with each one. For a person in accounts, that could mean using Copilot in Excel to build a PivotTable from the month's figures, then checking the totals before they go to a partner.

Setting up Copilot training

8Where we come in

Our investigation covers the AI your people use, what comes with the firm's software, and how long the firm's work takes today, so the firm starts from a baseline of its own. A session with your IT provider covers what the firm's systems permit. The findings belong to your firm whether or not we go any further together.

After that, each person completes AI Foundations. Cohort workshops, grouped by team or skill level, then work through the tools the firm already has on the team's own kind of work. In each team, an AI Champion keeps the methods going once we step back, and we measure task times again at three months.

If you'd like to talk through Copilot training for your firm, get in touch. The first conversation works out whether your firm is the right fit for the AI Uplift Program, and whether we are the right people to help.

Copilot training