Microsoft’s AI assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, grounded in your organization’s email, files and meetings.
- Works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and OneNote
- Premium license grounds answers in company email, files and meetings via Microsoft Graph
- Enterprise data protection, Purview controls and admin usage reports
- Copilot Chat with web grounding is included with eligible plans
- Add-on requires an existing Microsoft 365 business subscription
- Licensing tiers (Basic, Premium, usage-based) are confusing
- Cowork and Copilot Code cost extra through usage-based billing
Microsoft 365 Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant for the Office apps and the wider Microsoft 365 work environment. It comes in layers, from Copilot Chat included with eligible business plans to a paid add-on that connects the assistant to company data.
In Word it drafts, rewrites and summarizes documents; in Excel it analyzes data and builds formulas and visuals; in PowerPoint it creates or edits decks from prompts; in Outlook it drafts mail and summarizes threads; and in Teams it transcribes meetings and captures action items. The Premium license grounds answers in organizational data such as email, files, meetings and calendars through Microsoft Graph and the Work IQ layer, adds Copilot Search across Microsoft 365 and connected sources, and includes agents that use work data. Admins get Purview data protection, SharePoint Advanced Management and usage reports. Usage-based billing adds access to Copilot Cowork, which carries out tasks across Microsoft 365, and Copilot Code, a Frontier preview. A model selector offers Auto, Quick response and Think deeper modes.
The product targets organizations already standardized on Microsoft 365, where grounding in Graph data is the main reason to pay. Copilot Chat with web grounding comes at no extra cost with eligible plans, so many users can try the basics first. The full add-on requires a qualifying business subscription and an annual commitment for the lowest price, which makes it a team purchase rather than an individual one.
