Copilot · 16 September 2026 · 10 min read
An engineering firm, a healthcare group, a law firm, a logistics company and a non-profit. Which routines Copilot took over in each, which it did not, and the permissions problem that decides whether a rollout works at all.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is sold as an add-on for €26 per user per month on an annual commitment (€18.20 on the Business variant for companies under 300 seats), which is more than most people pay for the plan it sits on. So the question that decides whether to buy it is not “is it clever” but “which hours does it give back, to whom, and in which department”. Below are five patterns we see in five kinds of company. None of them is a demo; all of them depend on the same three things, which come at the end.
What the day looked like. Every project manager spent Monday morning turning the previous week’s emails, Teams threads and site-visit notes into a status report for the client, in the client’s template. Finance closed the month by opening forty supplier invoices as PDFs, retyping totals into Excel, and chasing the three that did not match a purchase order.
What Copilot changed. In Teams, the PM opens the project channel and asks Copilot to summarise the week’s decisions, open questions and who owes what; in Word, “draft the weekly status in the attached template from this summary” produces a first draft that is right in structure and needs ten minutes of editing instead of two hours of assembly. In Excel, Copilot explains a variance between forecast and actual in a sentence, and builds the pivot the finance lead used to build by hand. The invoice retyping did not go away — that needs an agent with a connector, which is the next article — but the reconciliation questions did: “which of these lines has no matching PO?” is a prompt now.
Hours back. Roughly two per PM per week, and a day per month in finance. The PMs were the surprise: they had never asked for the tool.
What the day looked like. HR answered the same forty questions by email every week — annual leave carry-over, the on-call policy, how to submit expenses — each answer typed fresh, each slightly different. Operations ran a Monday call with twelve clinic managers, and the notes were whoever remembered to take them.
What Copilot changed. The Teams meeting recap: every Monday call now produces a transcript, a summary by topic, and a list of action items with names, sent to the channel before the managers are back at their desks. For HR, Copilot in Outlook drafts the reply from the policy document on SharePoint — the same policy, the same answer, every time, with the link. The step after that, an HR agent that answers those questions without a human in the loop, is what Copilot Studio is for.
The catch that mattered here. Copilot respects permissions: it will surface any document the user can already open. In a healthcare group with fifteen years of SharePoint, that meant a salary review from 2019 appeared in a summary for a clinic manager who technically had access to the folder. The permissions review before rollout is not optional; it is the project.
What the day looked like. Associates spent the first hour of any new matter reading the correspondence to date; partners asked for “a summary of where we are” before every client call; the practice manager assembled monthly billing narratives from time entries.
What Copilot changed. “Summarise the email thread with the client since March, list every deadline mentioned and every document referenced” — in Outlook, on a thread of two hundred messages, in under a minute. In Word, first drafts of routine letters from the firm’s own precedents, with the firm’s house style, because the precedents live in SharePoint and Copilot reads them. The billing narratives are drafted from the time entries and edited, not written.
What it did not do. Legal analysis. Copilot summarises, drafts and finds; it does not advise, and the firm’s policy says so in writing. The productivity is in the hour before the thinking, not in the thinking.
What the day looked like. Sales wrote proposals by finding the last similar one and editing it, and lost an hour a day to CRM notes. Customer service answered “where is my shipment” and “what does this surcharge mean” from a tribal-knowledge wiki that three people understood.
What Copilot changed. In Outlook, a proposal request from a prospect becomes a draft reply that pulls the rate card and the terms from SharePoint, and the meeting notes from the last call in Teams. The sales rep edits the price and sends. Customer service uses Copilot Chat with the service manual as its source: the surcharge question is answered from the document, consistently. The shipment question needs the tracking system, which again means an agent with a connector rather than Copilot alone.
The number they watched. Time from enquiry to proposal fell from two days to one, which in a commodity business is the difference between winning and not being considered.
What the day looked like. Grant applications were assembled from previous applications, each one slightly out of date; the communications officer wrote the newsletter, the annual report and the social posts from the same source material three times.
What Copilot changed. One source document per programme in SharePoint; Copilot drafts the grant narrative in the funder’s structure from it, and the newsletter piece and the report section from the same source, so the numbers agree. The non-profit pays the Business Premium price for the plan and the charity price for Copilot, which is why this one is affordable at all.
Permissions. Copilot shows people what they are already allowed to see. Most tenants over five years old have over-shared folders nobody remembers. A readiness review — SharePoint sharing report, sensitivity labels on the sensitive folders, a purge of “Everyone except external users” links — comes before the first licence, not after the first incident. It is a fixed-price service on this site because it is the same job every time.
Where the data is. Copilot reads SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange and Teams. Data on a file server, in a Google Drive or in a line-of-business system is invisible to it. Companies that moved to Microsoft 365 properly — files in SharePoint, not on the old server — get the value; the ones that kept the file server do not, and blame the tool.
A pilot with a purpose. Twenty licences for the people whose day is described above, for three months, with a list of the routines each of them will try. Not twenty licences for the executive team, which is the pilot that fails: executives delegate the routine work Copilot is good at.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is €26 per user per month on an annual commitment (€312 a year), or the Business variant at €18.20 for tenants on Business Basic, Standard or Premium. It needs a qualifying base plan — Business Basic, Standard, Premium, or an E-plan — and the desktop Office apps for the full experience, which means Business Standard or above. The plan finder prices it with the base plan, and the readiness review is where a rollout should start.
Related: Which Copilot? The six compared · Copilot Studio: building agents inside your own tenant · Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude for a Microsoft 365 company · Business Premium, the plan most of these companies run.
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