Microsoft Copilot

What Microsoft Copilot does

Microsoft Copilot is an assistant that exists both as a consumer chat application and as a layer inside Microsoft 365, Windows and Edge. In the work version it reads from your organisation's mail, files, chats and meetings, so it can summarise a meeting you missed, find the document someone mentioned, or draft a reply with the right context. The consumer version handles general questions, image generation, web search and voice, and is included with Windows. Agents can be built for specific business processes and shared across a tenant. It suits organisations already committed to Microsoft 365 and users who want assistance inside Office applications. The limitations are licensing and variability: the useful work features require a per-seat add-on on top of existing subscriptions, capability differs noticeably between applications, and administrators control which data the assistant may access, which often limits it in practice.

How to use it

The consumer version needs nothing beyond a Microsoft account at copilot.microsoft.com, and it is already present in Windows and Edge. The work version is different: it requires a Microsoft 365 licence with the Copilot add-on, and until an administrator enables it and configures which content is searchable, its answers about company material will be thin. Once enabled, the most valuable entry points are inside the applications rather than the standalone chat: the side panel in Word for drafting against an existing document, the summary in Teams after a recorded meeting, and the prompt box in Outlook for triaging a thread. Ask questions that name files, people or meetings explicitly, since vague requests return generic web answers. Two practical points: results depend entirely on how well your organisation's content is organised and permissioned, and consumer and work accounts behave differently enough that switching between them mid-task causes confusion. It also helps to ask for a source or a link with each answer, since that makes the difference between a usable summary and an unverifiable one.

Best for

• Microsoft 365 workplaces
• meeting recaps
• document drafting
• email triage
• enterprise search

Strengths and limitations