Microsoft 365 Copilot launched with a lot of noise about being a "game changer", but at £24.70 per user per month on top of your existing licences, the question UK SME owners are actually asking is: is it worth it for our 30-person business?
Here's what we've learned from rolling it out for clients across Birmingham, Solihull and the wider West Midlands.
What Copilot actually does (in plain English)
Copilot sits inside the Microsoft 365 apps you already use, Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint, and uses your own company's data (emails, files, meetings, chats) plus a large language model to draft, summarise and analyse on your behalf.
Real examples from our own and our clients' use:
- "Summarise this 90-minute Teams meeting and pull out the action points." (Teams)
- "Draft a reply to this customer email matching the tone of my last three replies." (Outlook)
- "Build me a first-pass project status deck from this SharePoint folder." (PowerPoint)
- "Analyse this sales spreadsheet and tell me which products dropped year-on-year." (Excel)
The bit that's genuinely different from ChatGPT is that Copilot has access to your company's data, your SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams chats, calendars and emails. That's the value, and it's also the risk.
The licensing rules nobody mentions in the marketing
A few important things before you click "buy":
- You need a qualifying base licence. Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3 or E5. If you're still on Business Basic, Copilot can't be added.
- It's an annual commitment per seat. £24.70/user/month, billed annually. No monthly rolling option for SMEs.
- Minimum is 1 user. No more 300-seat minimum (that changed in early 2024). You can pilot with two or three.
- Web-based Copilot Chat is free. Confusingly, "Microsoft Copilot" (the free one in Edge/Bing) and "Copilot for Microsoft 365" (the paid one inside your apps) are different products. Only the paid one sees your company data.
The security conversation you have to have first
This is the part most resellers skip. Copilot respects your existing Microsoft 365 permissions, but it also surfaces files people technically had access to but never knew existed.
If your SharePoint sites, Teams channels and OneDrive shares were set up loosely (everyone-has-access-to-everything was the default for years in many SMEs), Copilot will cheerfully summarise the MD's salary spreadsheet for an intern who happens to have read access.
Before any client of ours goes live with Copilot, we run a permissions audit:
- Identify over-shared sites and files
- Apply Sensitivity Labels to confidential content
- Tighten SharePoint sharing defaults
- Enable Restricted SharePoint Search where needed
- Review Microsoft Purview data classifications
This is genuinely the biggest project, not the licensing. We cover the wider tooling on our cyber security page and the Microsoft 365 side on cloud support.
Where the £24.70 actually pays back
In a 30-person business, where we typically see real ROI:
- Sales and account management. Drafting follow-up emails, summarising calls, prepping for client meetings using all prior history. Easily an hour a day per rep.
- Operations and finance. Excel analysis that previously meant pivot tables now happens conversationally. Month-end commentary writes itself.
- Anyone in lots of meetings. Teams meeting recap and "what did we agree?" alone justifies the licence for managers.
Where it doesn't pay back yet:
- Highly regulated drafting. Legal, medical and financial drafting still needs human review, Copilot is a starting point, not a finished product.
- Specialist line-of-business apps. If your team lives in Sage, Xero, a CRM or a vertical app, Copilot doesn't reach into those (yet).
- Roles that don't use Microsoft 365 much. Warehouse, field engineers, shop floor, the licence is wasted.
Our honest recommendation for a 30-person SME
Start with 5-8 licences for the people who live in Outlook, Teams and Excel all day. Run a 90-day pilot. Measure time saved on a handful of recurring tasks (meeting summaries, email drafts, spreadsheet analysis). If it pays back, expand. If it doesn't, kill it without having committed your whole company to a £9k+ annual bill.
And, please, do the SharePoint permissions clean-up first. We've seen a few "Copilot disasters" that were actually permissions disasters waiting to happen.
Frequently asked questions
Is my company data used to train Microsoft's AI models? No. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is covered by the same data protection commitments as the rest of M365. Your prompts and data are not used to train the underlying foundation models.
Where is the data processed? Inside the Microsoft 365 service boundary, in the same EU data centres your tenant already uses. UK GDPR coverage is unchanged.
What about ChatGPT Enterprise instead? Different tool, different job. ChatGPT Enterprise is a better general-purpose assistant. Copilot wins specifically because it's embedded in the apps your staff already use and has read access (with proper permissions) to your company's knowledge.
Do I need a separate AI policy? Yes, and we help clients write one. It covers acceptable use, what staff can/can't paste into prompts, and how Copilot output should be reviewed before being sent externally.
Want to pilot Copilot properly?
We run 4-week Copilot readiness reviews for SMEs, permissions audit, licensing recommendation, pilot user selection and a written ROI report at the end. Book a call or read more on our cloud support service page.
Copilot won']t undo a misdirected message, for that, see how to recall an email in Outlook.
