Microsoft has attached the Copilot name to at least a dozen products, and the result is genuine confusion. Two colleagues can both say “we’re rolling out Copilot” and mean entirely different things. One means the $30-a-seat assistant inside Word and Teams. The other means the free chat window pinned to the Windows taskbar. The tools differ in what they can reach, what they cost, and what they are actually good at.
So here is a plain tour of the main Microsoft Copilot tools, with the parts that work, the parts that don’t, and a few numbers to anchor the decisions.
Copilot in Microsoft 365: the flagship with the invoice
This is the version most people mean. At $30 per user per month on an annual commitment, it plugs into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Loop and OneNote, and it can read your organisation’s mail, files, chats and calendar through Microsoft Graph. That grounding in your own data is the whole point. A generic chatbot can write a project update. Copilot inside Word can write one that references the actual project folder.
Word and Outlook: where the minutes come back
Two features earn their keep. In Word, “Draft with Copilot” turns a scrappy brief into a first pass you can edit, and the rewrite tools are good at the tedious jobs: cutting a paragraph to 80 words, shifting a memo from stiff to plain. In Outlook, “Summarize” collapses a 30-message thread into a few lines and pulls out what people want from you.
One limitation worth knowing: Outlook’s summary only covers the conversation you have open. It will not stitch together three related threads from different senders, which is often the real task.
Teams recaps
With transcription switched on, Copilot produces a recap of any meeting: who said what, what was decided, and which action items landed on named people. On the 45-minute call you missed, this is genuinely useful. On a five-minute stand-up, reading the recap takes longer than watching the recording.
Excel: strong on tables, shaky on modelling
Set expectations here or you will be disappointed. Copilot in Excel performs well when your data sits in a proper table, so select the range and hit Ctrl+T first. Ask it to add a calculated column, flag outliers, split a name field or build a PivotTable and it usually delivers. Ask for a three-sheet financial model with linked assumptions and it starts to wobble. Treat every formula it writes as a draft to be checked against the source rows.
PowerPoint
“Create presentation from file” builds a deck from a Word document and respects your template. The structure is generic and the slides are thin, but as a scaffold to rewrite it beats a blank page. Reach for it when you have an hour, not when you have ten minutes.
Copilot Chat: free, and quietly the best place to start
Copilot Chat lives at copilot.microsoft.com, in the Edge sidebar, and behind Win+C on Windows. The free version is a web-grounded assistant with image generation and voice, and it is decent. Signed in with a work account, you get enterprise data protection and, depending on licensing, access to your own files plus the ability to build simple agents.
The hierarchy trips people up, so here it is plainly. Copilot Chat is the chat window. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the chat window plus Copilot embedded in the apps plus full Graph grounding. You can work productively in the first for months and never need the second. If you are still deciding which assistant deserves the browser tab, it is worth reading about why the best AI chatbot is probably not the one you expect.
Copilot Studio: where the interesting work happens
Copilot Studio is the low-code builder for custom agents. You define topics, point the agent at knowledge sources such as a SharePoint site or a Dataverse table, and connect it to systems like ServiceNow, SAP or your own API. A typical first build is an IT helpdesk agent that answers password and VPN questions and escalates everything else to a human queue.
Billing runs on message packs, roughly $200 for 25,000 messages, or pay-as-you-go. The build is the easy part. The hard part is boundaries. Agents that can take actions need scoped permissions, logging and a defined escalation path before they meet real users, which is why it pays to read up on how to design architectural guardrails around AI agents before you publish anything.
GitHub Copilot: the developer tool that came first
GitHub Copilot predates the rest of the branding and remains the most mature product in the family. There is a free tier with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests a month, Pro at $10, Business at $19 per user, and Enterprise at $39. It runs in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs and Neovim, and agent mode can take a GitHub issue and open a pull request against it.
For teams already paying for Microsoft 365 Copilot, this is a separate line item on a separate bill. Check that before you sign, because stacked AI subscriptions are how software budgets quietly double, a trap mapped out in why your AI bill is a toll booth and how to stop paying twice.
The smaller tools worth knowing
- Researcher and Analyst: two agents inside Microsoft 365 Copilot. Researcher runs multi-step investigations across the web and your documents. Analyst writes and executes Python against spreadsheets when you need real statistical work rather than a chart.
- Copilot Pages: a shared canvas where you and colleagues edit AI-generated content together, useful for turning a chat into a document that survives the meeting.
- Copilot in Windows and Edge: system shortcuts, page summarisation and side-by-side tab comparison. Small, free, easy to forget.
- Copilot for Sales and Service: CRM-aware versions that read from Dynamics 365 or Salesforce and log activity back into the record.
- Copilot in Viva and Teams Phone: niche, but real for HR teams and contact centres handling high volumes of repetitive queries.
What a sensible first month looks like
Do not switch everything on at once. Pick one job that currently eats 30 minutes a day and measure it for four weeks. Meeting recaps for a team with back-to-back calls. Outlook summaries for an account manager with a 200-message inbox. Spreadsheet cleanup for whoever owns the monthly report.
Then check the arithmetic before expanding. At $30 a seat, saving 20 minutes a week at a $60 hourly rate puts you near break-even. That is a real return only if people change their habits. The most common failure looks the same everywhere: buy seats, run one training session, discover in month three that usage sits at 12% and nobody can explain why.
One workflow, one measurement, one decision. That principle holds for any stack you are assembling, and it matters more here than usual, because Microsoft’s bundle is wide enough to tempt you into switching on features nobody asked for. The guidance on starting with one job instead of twenty apps is the right lens for Copilot too.