Microsoft 365 Copilot

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant built directly into the Microsoft 365 apps your team already uses — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. It uses large language models (LLMs) combined with your organisation's own data in Microsoft Graph to generate content, summarise information, and automate repetitive tasks.

Unlike a standalone AI tool, Copilot has access to your emails, documents, meetings, and chats — which makes it significantly more useful for work tasks, but also raises important governance questions about what data it can access and who can see what.

What Copilot does in each app

Copilot capabilities vary by application:

• Word — draft documents from a prompt, rewrite or summarise existing content, adjust tone and length
• Excel — analyse data, generate formulas, create charts, and identify trends from natural language questions
• PowerPoint — create presentations from a Word document or prompt, add slides, reformat layouts
• Outlook — summarise long email threads, draft replies, prepare for meetings based on email context
• Teams — summarise meetings in real time, generate action items, catch up on missed conversations
• Microsoft 365 Chat — ask questions across all your data: emails, documents, meetings, and chats

Licensing requirements

Microsoft 365 Copilot requires a base Microsoft 365 licence (Business Standard, Business Premium, or an E3/E5 plan) plus a Copilot add-on licence per user. The add-on is a significant additional cost per user per month.

Not every user needs a Copilot licence. The right approach is to identify the roles where Copilot will deliver the most value — typically knowledge workers who spend significant time writing, analysing data, or in meetings — and licence those users first.

The governance question you must answer first

Before deploying Copilot, you need to understand what data it can access. Copilot respects existing Microsoft 365 permissions — it can only surface data that the user already has access to. But many organisations have overly permissive SharePoint and OneDrive sharing settings, meaning Copilot could surface documents that were technically accessible but practically obscure.

A Copilot readiness assessment should include a review of SharePoint permissions, sensitivity labels, and data classification. Documents that shouldn't be broadly accessible need to be locked down before Copilot is deployed.

What Copilot is not

Copilot is not a replacement for human judgement. It generates drafts, summaries, and suggestions — all of which need to be reviewed before use. It can hallucinate: produce confident-sounding content that is factually incorrect. Treating Copilot output as a first draft rather than a finished product is the right mental model.

Copilot also doesn't have access to data outside Microsoft 365 unless you configure plugins or connectors. It works with what's in your Microsoft environment — emails, Teams messages, SharePoint documents, and OneDrive files.

Getting the most out of Copilot

The businesses that get the most value from Copilot are those that invest in adoption — training staff on effective prompting, identifying the highest-value use cases for each role, and building Copilot into existing workflows rather than treating it as a standalone tool.

I.T.S Canberra manages Copilot licensing, deployment, and governance configuration, including the pre-deployment data hygiene work that ensures Copilot surfaces the right information to the right people.