What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, built into Windows, Edge, and the Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams). It runs on OpenAI's models but, in its business form, is grounded in your organization's own work data through the Microsoft Graph.
It comes in tiers: a free consumer Copilot on the web, in Windows, and in Edge; Copilot Pro for individuals who want priority access in their personal Office apps; and Microsoft 365 Copilot for businesses, which can reason over your emails, files, chats, and meetings with enterprise data protection. Copilot Studio lets organizations build custom agents over their own data.
If your organization already runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot is the assistant that can see your actual work, and the one to evaluate first.
What it's best for
- Microsoft 365 workflows: drafting in Word, formulas and analysis in Excel, decks in PowerPoint, and email or meeting summaries in Outlook and Teams.
- Grounding in your own data: answers across your emails, documents, chats, and calendar via the Microsoft Graph, honoring existing permissions.
- Windows and Edge users: an assistant a keystroke away in the operating system and browser.
- Enterprises that need commercial data protection: prompts and responses excluded from training the foundation models.
- Meeting recap and catch-up: Teams transcription, summaries, and action items.
- Building organization-specific agents with Copilot Studio, mostly low-code.
Where it falls short
- Teams outside the Microsoft ecosystem. Much of the value is the Microsoft 365 grounding.
- Open-weight or self-hosted needs. Copilot is a closed, hosted service.
- The lowest-cost raw model access at scale. For that, call the OpenAI or Azure OpenAI API directly.
- Workflows that need one fixed model you control. Microsoft manages model versions behind the product.
Getting started
Use the free Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com, from the Windows taskbar, or in Edge, and sign in with a Microsoft account. For answers grounded in your work data, your organization needs Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing.
Consumer Copilot is a capable general assistant; the business value appears once it can see your tenant's mail, files, and meetings.
Inside the Office apps
Open the Copilot pane in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Teams to draft, summarize, analyze, and transform content in place. Reference a specific file or person with '/' so it pulls the right context.
Common moves: turn a Word doc into a deck, summarize a long email thread, draft a reply in your style, or build a pivot and chart from a sheet.
Grounding and custom agents
Microsoft 365 Copilot answers across the Microsoft Graph (your mail, files, chats, and calendar) and respects the permissions you already have, so it can't surface what you couldn't open yourself.
Copilot Studio builds custom agents over your data and connectors for repeated tasks, such as an HR-policy assistant or an IT triage bot, without heavy coding.
Getting better answers
Point it at the source (name the document, the people, or the time range) rather than asking in the abstract; grounding is what makes it better than a generic chatbot.
Be explicit about format and length, and always sanity-check generated numbers in Excel against the underlying data before you rely on them.
What Microsoft Copilot costs
Approximate, in USD, as of January 2026. Prices change often. Confirm on the official site before you rely on them.
Free
$0
Consumer Copilot on the web, Windows, and Edge, on capable models with limits.
Copilot Pro
~$20 / month
Individuals: priority access and Copilot inside personal Office apps.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
~$30 / user / month
Business: grounding in work data and enterprise data protection; usually annual, requires an M365 plan.
Azure OpenAI / API
Usage-based
For developers, the underlying OpenAI models on Azure are billed separately, per token.
Example prompts
Copy these into Microsoft Copilot as starting points, then adapt them to your task.
Catch up on what you missed
Summarize everything I missed in the [Project] Teams channel and my email this week. List the decisions made, the open questions, and anything that needs my reply.
Turn a doc into a deck
Create a 10-slide PowerPoint from the attached Word document. Keep our section order, add a summary slide at the front, and suggest one chart for each data-heavy section.
Analyze a spreadsheet
In this sheet, add a column flagging orders more than 30 days late, build a pivot table by region, and write a two-sentence summary of the trend you see.
Microsoft Copilot
common questions.
Direct answers to the questions we get asked the most. If yours isn't covered, write to the team.