Microsoft has been rolling Copilot into M365 all through 2025, and if your organisation is on a Business Premium or E3/E5 plan, there's a good chance it's already sitting in your toolbar. Whether anyone on your team has actually clicked on it is a different question entirely.
What It Does in Outlook
The inbox is where most people feel the impact first. Copilot can summarise long email threads into a few sentences. If you've been on vacation and come back to 340 unread messages, it can surface the threads that actually need your attention. It drafts replies. You give it a direction and it produces something usable. Not perfect. Usable.
Microsoft's own usage data showed that summarise was the most-used Copilot feature in Outlook by a factor of three. That makes sense. Reading through a 47-message thread to figure out where a decision landed is exactly the kind of work that AI handles well.
The reply drafting is more hit-or-miss. It gets the tone right maybe 70% of the time. The other 30%, you're editing enough that you wonder if you should have just typed it yourself. But that ratio improves as you use it more.
What It Does in Teams
Meeting recaps. This is the feature that should sell the product on its own.
Copilot joins your meeting, transcribes the conversation, and produces a structured summary: what was discussed, what was decided, and what action items came out of it. You can ask it questions after. "What did Sarah say about the timeline?" and it pulls the relevant section.
A Microsoft Work Trend Index survey found that 68% of people say they struggle to keep up during meetings because they're focused on taking notes. Copilot handles the notes. You handle the thinking.
What It Does in Word
You can prompt Copilot to generate a first draft. The quality depends entirely on your prompt. Where I've seen it work best is for templated documents: proposals, status reports, meeting agendas, policy summaries. Where it struggles: anything requiring deep domain knowledge or understanding of your specific client relationships.
The Change Management Problem
Here's the part that matters more than any feature list.
I've seen organisations pay for 50 Copilot licences and have 4 people using it regularly. An 8% adoption rate on a tool that costs $30 per user per month.
The tool isn't the problem. The rollout is. Most companies buy the licences, send an email announcement, maybe run a lunch-and-learn, and wonder why nobody's using it three months later.
The organisations I've seen succeed did it differently. They identified 5 to 8 people who were already curious about AI and turned them into internal champions. They paired champions with specific teams and had them demonstrate Copilot on real work, not demo scenarios. They tracked usage monthly and followed up with people who had stopped, not to pressure them, but to understand what wasn't working.
None of that is glamorous. But it's the difference between a $30-per-seat expense and a $30-per-seat investment.
Copilot is a solid tool. It saves real time on real tasks. But it only works if your people actually use it. And getting them to use it is a human problem, not a technology one.