Copilot: What Works, What Doesn't

Most leaders I talk to are circling the same question. Should we get Copilot? The licence is around €200 per user per year. For a 30-person company that's around €6,000 annually. That's not nothing.

I've been certified in Microsoft 365 and the Copilot ecosystem for a while now. I've watched companies roll it out well and watched companies waste the money. There's a pattern.

What it actually does well

Copilot lives inside the apps your team already uses. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. It has access to your emails, your files, your meetings — and that's where the value is.

A daglig leder I worked with cut his email time roughly in half. Not by writing fewer emails, but by giving Copilot three bullet points and letting it draft the polish. Sales people use it to summarize a long client thread before a meeting. Finance asks it to explain what's happening in an Excel sheet someone else built three years ago. Nobody in marketing makes a slide deck from scratch anymore — they paste a Word doc and let Copilot draft the first version.

These are unglamorous wins. Nobody writes a case study about saving four hours a week on email. But it adds up.

Where it falls flat

Two places, mostly.

First, your data has to be in order. Copilot is only as good as the SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams content it can search. If your files are scattered, mislabelled, or sitting on someone's desktop, Copilot will give you confused answers and hallucinate the rest. Companies that haven't done basic data hygiene see almost no value from it. Companies with their environment in good shape see real value almost immediately. There's no middle ground.

Second, the aha moment can take weeks. People try it once, get a mediocre answer, and stop using it. Copilot rewards people who actually learn how to ask. If you roll it out without any training, you'll pay the licence and watch your team forget about it.

The honest cost

The licence is the visible cost. The real cost is the time it takes to get your data ready and your team trained. For most SMBs, that's a few weeks of internal work, plus help from someone who knows what they're doing.

For a 30-person company, the math usually works. For a 5-person company, you're better off with the free tier of ChatGPT and Copilot in the browser. For a 200-person company, the math works easily — but someone has to own the rollout, or it falls apart.

The takeaway

Copilot isn't magic. It's a useful tool for companies who already use Microsoft 365 and are willing to put their data house in order. Skip that part, and you're paying €200 per seat for slightly better autocomplete.

Start with the small stuff. The inbox. The first drafts. The "summarize this Teams meeting" button. If those land, expand. If they don't, fix the data first.

Want help thinking through your own rollout? Get in touch.