Tool Introduction

Microsoft 365 Copilot is built by Microsoft Corporation, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft announced the product on March 16, 2023, and on September 21, 2023 said it would reach general availability for Enterprise customers buying 300 or more licenses starting November 1, 2023.

The product was later renamed Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft documentation, with the legacy name persisting in some licenses, and an August 2026 announcement covered merging the consumer Copilot app into one application. Paid seats passed 30 million by the Q4 FY2026 earnings call.

Demo Available?

Microsoft's official Business pricing page offers a Contact Sales path to a Microsoft sales specialist who can add Copilot to an existing subscription or set up a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan, and its FAQ separately invites buyers to contact an AI expert with purchasing questions. That is a sales consultation and guided evaluation rather than a named, scheduled product demo.

Aggregate Rating

4.6/5 stars (based on 20000+ verified reviews across the internet)

Detailed Overview

What Microsoft 365 Copilot Does

Copilot handles everyday work inside the apps staff already open: it drafts and rewrites in Word, builds formulas, pivot tables and charts in Excel, produces branded PowerPoint decks, and summarizes Teams meetings up to 30 days back with action items. Answers are grounded in the organization's Microsoft Graph content, meaning its emails, files, meetings and chats, retrieved only under the permissions the requesting person already holds.

Who Microsoft 365 Copilot Is For

Knowledge workers who live in Office files and Teams meetings are the intended users, from individual subscribers on Microsoft 365 Personal to whole departments at large employers. Published deployments cover finance staff at Levi Strauss & Co., procurement at EY, HR teams at Kantar, quality engineers at Eaton, and research teams at S&P Global. Manufacturing, banking and software run the most Copilot agents.

Top Differentiators

Copilot runs inside the Microsoft 365 service boundary, inheriting existing Entra ID permissions, sensitivity labels and retention policies, and enforces Microsoft Purview data-loss-prevention rules on what it surfaces; Microsoft describes ChatGPT Enterprise as a separate service outside that boundary. Model choice is the second difference: one experience reaches the latest OpenAI GPT-5.X models plus Anthropic models, with Quick response and Think deeper reasoning modes.

Founding Year

1975

Target Industry

B2B, B2C, SMB, Enterprise, Manufacturing, Banking, Software and Technology, Automotive, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Professional Services, Health Insurance, Retail and Apparel, Market Research, Data and Analytics, Engineering

Available Integrations

Copilot connectors: over 100 prebuilt connectors from Microsoft and partners, in synced form that indexes data into Microsoft Graph or federated form that fetches read-only in real time over OAuth 2.0.
Box: Certified for Microsoft 365 Copilot connector that searches and surfaces Box content in Copilot; certification is a narrower tier than the wider catalog.
getAbstract: Certified connector delivering licensed business-knowledge summaries in leadership, sales, finance and digital transformation as grounding content, not an action-taking integration.
CB Insights: Certified connector supplying company and market data such as funding events, business relationships and predictive outlook; read-only research rather than transactional.
Atlassian Confluence: partner connectors from Accenture, RheinInsights, BA Insight and ServiceNow index spaces, pages, blogs and attachments; depth and support vary by publisher.
Atlassian Jira: partner connectors from BA Insight, RheinInsights, Accenture and ServiceNow index projects, issues, comments and attachments for Copilot Chat and Search.
Google Drive: BA Insight, RheinInsights and ServiceNow connectors index files and folders under Google's native permission model; support is partner-dependent.
Microsoft Dynamics 365: the RheinInsights connector indexes knowledge articles, cases, contacts, accounts and opportunities, though this implementation is partner-built and partner-supported.
Microsoft Teams: BA Insight and ServiceNow connectors index Teams conversations and attachments for unified search, layered on Teams rather than a single native path.
Copilot Studio and Agent Builder: build custom agents published through the Microsoft Marketplace and admin center for Teams, Outlook and the Office apps, sharing one unified manifest.
Power Platform connectors and API plugins: extend agents to take actions such as resetting a password or creating a ticket, gated by admin governance over allowed connectors.

Prices are per user per month in USD from the official Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business pricing page, which toggles between plans with Teams and without Teams, and between yearly and monthly billing. Microsoft states prices may vary by market.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business (add-on): $21.00 paid yearly, discounted to $18.00 paid yearly, or $25.20 paid monthly. A separate qualifying Microsoft 365 Business license for up to 300 users is required. Includes Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, chat powered by Work IQ, reasoning AI for research and data analysis, pre-built Microsoft agents (Researcher, Analyst, Facilitator), usage and adoption analytics, and LLM model choice.
Promotion terms: the $18.00 price runs July 1, 2026 through December 31, 2026, requires an annual commitment, applies to the first year only, auto-renews with recurring annual billing and a payment method on file, excludes trial subscriptions, allows a 7-day cancellation window for a prorated refund, and cannot combine with other offers.
Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot: $23.50 paid yearly or $28.20 paid monthly with Teams; $20.30 paid yearly or $24.36 paid monthly without Teams. Includes 1 TB cloud storage per user, identity and access management for up to 300 users, and automatic spam and malware filtering.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot: $32.00 paid yearly or $38.40 paid monthly with Teams; $28.80 paid yearly or $34.56 paid monthly without Teams. Adds advanced identity and access management for up to 300 users, enhanced cyberthreat protection, sensitive-data discovery, classification and protection, 1 TB cloud storage per user, 10+ additional apps including Loop, Clipchamp, Bookings, Planner and Forms, and anytime phone and web support.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: no additional cost for all Microsoft Entra account users with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, covering web information, current-generation language models, file uploads with limits, Copilot Pages, IT controls and enterprise-grade privacy and security, with metered pricing for agents.
Enterprise and Copilot Studio tiers: shown as plan categories on the pricing page without published per-seat prices, with a Contact Sales link.
Billing terms: paid subscriptions auto-renew and can be canceled anytime in the Microsoft 365 admin center; certain subscriptions may incur a cancellation fee, and canceling deletes all associated data.

Pricing last verified: 09/09/2026
Disclaimer: Pricing is subject to change. Please confirm current pricing on the vendor site.

Features & Specs

Model family: the plan comparison lists Latest OpenAI models GPT-5.X, routed in real time across Auto, Quick response and Think deeper modes; Anthropic models serve as an additional subprocessor.
Copilot Chat: web-grounded chat at no additional cost for Entra account users on an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, with file uploads and Copilot Pages.
Cowork: generally available June 2026; plans, executes, tests and completes multi-step tasks across apps under usage-based billing.
Work IQ: combines Microsoft 365 content and metadata, connector-ingested line-of-business data, a semantic index over Microsoft Graph, and Copilot Memory; a usage-based Work IQ API is licensed separately.
Agents: Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator ship with Premium; custom agents come from Copilot Studio or Agent Builder, with usage past included allotments billed in Copilot Credits.
Notebooks: gathers a user's chats, files and meeting notes into one workspace and generates podcast-style audio summaries.
Create: turns prompts, templates or a company brand kit into documents, videos, podcasts or surveys.
Teams meetings: summarization reaches 30 days of history for Basic-license users, with transcription and action-item capture.
License tiers: Copilot Chat (Basic), Microsoft 365 Copilot (Basic) with non-priority in-app access, and Premium adding priority access and admin analytics.

Security & Compliance

Prompts, responses and organizational data retrieved through Microsoft Graph are never used to train Microsoft's foundation large language models, including the OpenAI and Anthropic models Copilot uses. Copilot surfaces only content the requesting user already has at least view permission to, honoring SharePoint permissions, Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels and Information Rights Management, including usage rights on content encrypted with Purview Information Protection.

Data protection: Enterprise Data Protection applies the same contractual commitments customers hold for Exchange email and SharePoint files, with tenant-level logical isolation through Microsoft Entra authorization and role-based access control.
Encryption: at rest and in transit using BitLocker, per-file encryption, TLS and IPsec.
Data residency: the EU Data Boundary is honored for EU traffic, though Anthropic-provided models are excluded from EU Data Boundary coverage.
Certifications and frameworks: GDPR, ISO/IEC 27018 for cloud privacy, ISO 27001, ISO 42001 for AI management systems, and HIPAA.
Retention and deletion: admins manage retention, legal hold and deletion of Copilot interaction history through Microsoft Purview and Content Search; users delete their own activity history in the Microsoft My Account portal.
Identity and admin roles: Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on, plus a least-privilege AI Administrator role for governing Copilot and agents without full Global Administrator rights.
Safety systems: defense-in-depth jailbreak and prompt-injection detection and content-harm filters for hate and fairness, sexual, violence and self-harm categories, with Copilot opted out of Azure OpenAI standard abuse-monitoring human review.
Copilot Copyright Commitment: Microsoft defends commercial customers and pays adverse judgments or settlements in copyright suits over Copilot output when built-in guardrails and content filters were used.

Industry Use-Cases

Supply chain operations at Microsoft

Six end-to-end workflows were simplified first and put on a shared data foundation. More than 70 purpose-built agents then went to work across planning, sourcing, fulfillment and logistics, and cycle time across those workflows dropped 75%. Outcomes throughout this section come from the company's published case studies.

Manufacturing quality at Eaton

Root causes at Eaton, an intelligent power-management company, sit buried in report backlogs that quality experts must read through. An AI-powered quality agent has been applied across roughly 5,000 manufacturing-quality reports, surfacing trends, supplier insights and probable root causes for those experts to confirm.

Contract processing at Premera Blue Cross

Employees at Premera Blue Cross, a health plan serving Washington and Alaska, built more than 900 Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot agents themselves. One contract-exhibit agent cut a manual document workflow from 30 to 45 minutes down to about three minutes.

Finance process mapping at Levi Strauss & Co.

Sizing an automation opportunity nobody had measured was the starting problem. In a single day, an agent analyzed 1,100 finance standard operating procedures and cataloged 18,000 individual tasks. Lisa Sterling, Vice President of Finance, said the agent sized an opportunity she had assumed was impossible to quantify.

Procurement at EY

Low-cost, low-risk purchases absorb buyer hours that higher-value sourcing needs. Since an October 2025 pilot, an Autonomous Sourcing Agent has supported more than 200 such transactions at EY, and roughly 1,500 are expected over the following year.

Commodities research at S&P Global

Clients wanted quicker access to commodities research spread across systems. Built in Microsoft Teams with Copilot Agent Builder and Microsoft Graph connectors, an S&P Global agent opened that research to customers directly, delivering 95% faster data extraction and 98% faster comparative analysis.

HR service delivery at Kantar

An employment-verification letter used to take three days at Kantar, a marketing data and analytics firm. A people-agent system returns one in about 120 seconds, and HR queries resolved without human intervention rose from 0% in February to roughly 40% against a 95% year-end target.

Sales enablement at Microsoft

Seller roles were mapped to dedicated agents including Researcher, Analyst Agent, Sales Agent, Deal Agent and MSXi Copilot. Across 687 sellers tracked from January to June 2024 against low-usage peers, time on customer-facing work doubled from 25% to 50%, and the pilot group closed deals 20% faster with 9.4% more revenue per head.

Tool's Alternatives

Google Gemini for Google Workspace is embedded across the same productivity surface, drafting in Docs, building tables in Sheets, generating editable Slides, summarizing Gmail threads and taking notes in Meet. Some Meet features remain in preview or beta, and enterprise agent tooling with governance controls sits at the Enterprise tier rather than the base tier. Its distinguishing move is bundling standalone AI products alongside the in-app assistant: Gemini Notebook for source-grounded research with audio overviews, Vids for video creation and Studio for cross-app workflows.

OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise centers on ChatGPT Work, which plans and acts across connected apps and files to produce spreadsheets, slides, docs and live dashboards for engineering, marketing, operations, finance, sales and data analytics teams, on a base OpenAI states exceeds 5 million business users. It reaches Office files through connectors and uploads rather than living inside the Office apps. Pairing that general business agent with Codex, a coding agent that inspects codebases, runs tests and prepares pull requests, under one plan is its distinguishing combination.

Anthropic Claude Enterprise ships Claude for Microsoft 365, putting Claude directly inside Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, alongside Claude Code for agentic coding, Claude Cowork for delegated background tasks and Claude Design for prompt-to-visuals. Anthropic's own FAQ places custom data retention controls and OpenTelemetry monitoring on Claude Enterprise only, leaving gaps on its lower Team tier. Connecting to Gmail, Google Drive, Slack and Microsoft 365 at once positions it as a cross-platform layer rather than a single-suite assistant.

Amazon Quick, the rebranded successor to Amazon Q Business, unifies cited search across documents, databases, data warehouses, images, audio and video, adds no-code app building, and documents over 50 cross-application actions in tools such as Jira, Salesforce, ServiceNow and PagerDuty, reaching users through Outlook, Word, Teams and Slack extensions. AWS states Amazon Q Business is closed to new customers and directs them to migrate, so the branding is in transition. Its native tie to AWS-hosted data sources and IAM-based permissions suits organizations whose systems of record live on AWS.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Microsoft 365 Copilot cost for a business?

The Copilot Business add-on lists at $21.00 per user per month paid yearly, promotionally $18.00 through December 31, 2026, or $25.20 paid monthly, and requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business plan.

Is there a guided demo or sales walkthrough?

The pricing page carries a Contact Sales link to a Microsoft sales specialist who can add Copilot to an existing subscription or set up a qualifying plan, and its FAQ invites buyers to contact an AI expert. No self-serve demo is published there.

Does Copilot train models on company data?

Prompts, responses and organizational data retrieved through Microsoft Graph are never used to train Microsoft's foundation models, including the OpenAI and Anthropic models Copilot uses. Data stays logically isolated per tenant.

Which apps include Copilot in the Business bundles?

Copilot works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Business Standard with Copilot costs $23.50 per user monthly paid yearly, and Business Premium with Copilot costs $32.00, both including 1 TB of storage per user.

What compliance certifications does Microsoft 365 Copilot support?

Microsoft states support for GDPR, ISO/IEC 27018, ISO 27001, ISO 42001 and HIPAA, with encryption at rest and in transit through BitLocker, per-file encryption, TLS and IPsec.

How many users can Business plans cover?

Business plans with Copilot cap identity and access management at 300 users, and the add-on requires a qualifying license for up to 300 users. Enterprise tiers carry no such cap.

What is Copilot Cowork and its billing?

Cowork reached general availability in June 2026 and takes multi-step, multi-app tasks end to end, planning, executing and testing them. Premium customers get it through usage-based billing.

Can Copilot reach data outside Microsoft 365?

Over 100 prebuilt connectors from Microsoft and partners reach outside content, including Box, Confluence, Jira and Google Drive, through synced indexing into Microsoft Graph or real-time federated retrieval.

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Microsoft 365 Copilot

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