We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Microsoft’s unified Copilot announcement at Ignite 2023 — the moment when “Copilot” stopped being a collection of features and started becoming the face of Microsoft’s AI vision. What began as an experiment to bring AI-powered productivity into Office applications has since grown into a full-blown Copilot ecosystem that now spans the entire Microsoft Cloud: from Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 to Azure, Power Platform, and beyond.
During these past two years, Copilot has been the subject of much debate, drawing praise for its innovative new features while facing criticism for its price tag and uneven early performance. Meanwhile, the rest of the AI landscape has largely closed the gap that once existed thanks to Microsoft’s early and (at the time) exclusive partnership with OpenAI. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini continue to push the boundaries of creativity, reasoning, and accessibility, forcing many organizations to ask a crucial question: where does Microsoft Copilot fit into the bigger picture of AI at work?
With that in mind, this article takes a closer look at where Copilot stands today in terms of its pricing and licensing models, how customers are responding, how the product continues to evolve, and how it compares with other leading AI assistants. Most importantly, we’ll tackle the big question every business leader is asking right now as we're in the midst of budget season: is Copilot really worth the investment?
Where Copilot Stands Today
Around 18 months ago, I wrote an article entitled Copilots Everywhere! Understanding Microsoft's Copilot Strategy. At the time, we were hearing from many customers who were struggling to make sense of Microsoft’s rapidly expanding Copilot lineup. There were plenty of questions about licensing costs, what was included in existing plans, and how all the different Copilots were supposed to work together.
Figure 1: From Copilot Overload to a Unified Vision
Fast-forward to today, and Microsoft’s Copilot vision is far easier to understand. Microsoft has simplified things by centering around a single Microsoft 365 Copilot plan that costs $30 per user per month. This plan provides users with broad access to Copilot features across Microsoft's entire cloud portfolio:
Productivity Suite Integration: Copilot integration within Office apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
Grounded in Your Data: With deep integration to Microsoft Graph, Copilot is able to "think" and "reason" over your enterprise data. In other words, it can synthesize context from Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive to deliver insights that are uniquely relevant to your organization.
Seamless Access: Access Copilot from anywhere: Office apps, your Windows desktop, your Edge browser, or via the web at https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat. This brings AI capabilities to the point where work happens, so users can access powerful Copilot features seamlessly across Microsoft 365 apps on any device.
Enterprise-Grade Security & Compliance: Copilot is built on the Microsoft 365 trust model, ensuring enterprise-grade security, compliance, and admin controls for access, logging, and usage analytics.
Administration & Integration Features: With Copilot Studio and the Power Platform, you can build, extend, and customize agent experiences across your entire organization.
Taken together, this feature convergence shows how much the Copilot story has settled into a more cohesive and understandable offering. These updates have made Copilot easier to use, simpler to license, and more accessible across the apps people use every day. In this sense, it's finally delivering on Microsoft’s original vision of having a “copilot” that's present wherever work happens and supports users naturally within the flow of their workday.
Figure 2: M365 Copilot Mobile Experience
Copilot and Microsoft's Grand Vision for Agentic AI
Earlier this year, Microsoft released its annual Work Trend Index Report. This year's title was "The Year the Frontier Firm is Born" and it provides some unique insights into how Microsoft sees AI adoption playing out in three evolutionary phases:
Human with Assistant: This phase is where most teams are with Copilot (or other AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT) today. Here, human beings are getting up to speed with basic generative AI concepts and learning how to leverage AI assistants to help them work more efficiently.
Human-Agent Teams: At this phase, agents take on a more interactive role in day-to-day operations. While humans continue to lead the charge and provide direction, agents are positioned as "digital colleagues" that can be called upon to answer questions or assist with routine tasks.
Human-Led, Agent-Operated: At this final phase, agents assume more direct responsibility over business process execution while humans are mostly providing oversight where needed.
While Phase 3 may still be a little farther down the road, Microsoft is clearly building toward it. Each Copilot update—whether it’s deeper app integration, more reasoning capability, or new agentic features in Copilot Studio—moves organizations closer to that future. The journey won't be instantaneous, but the foundation is being laid today. For the frontier firms that aspire to operate at this next level, Copilot is becoming the baseline infrastructure they’ll rely on to get there.
Copilot's UX Makeover
Over the past year or so, Microsoft's been hard at work giving Copilot a thoughtful UX makeover. The goal was simple: make Copilot feel consistent no matter where you use it and reduce the friction that often comes with jumping between apps.
Figure 3: Refined M365 Copilot User Experience
As you can see in Figure 3, the new UI has been streamlined to help users focus less on how to use Copilot and more on actually getting work done. Let's look at some of the highlights:
Navigation Sidebar: Along the lefthand side of the screen, all of the disparate tools have been neatly organized into a collapsable navigation menu.
Work / Web Switch: This switch controls whether or not Copilot is grounding its responses based on internal work data (e.g., documents in SharePoint or OneDrive) or public web data.
Chat/Conversation Pane: This is the main interaction area in Copilot. Looking carefully at Figure 3, you can see that UI supports multi-modal access. In other words, besides text-based chat, you also have the option to talk to Copilot or even have it reason over document or image data (i.e., computer vision).
AI Model Selection: This menu button enables you to toggle between different AI models (e.g., ChatGPT 4.1 vs. ChatGPT 5). Over time, additional model options are expected to be made available here.
Settings: Within this pane, you can configure and personalize Copilot to "remember" more about you, your work habits, and so forth.
Agent List: In addition to the default chat agent, this menu enables you to leverage a host of purpose-built agents developed by Microsoft, its partners, and even your own custom agents. More on this in the next section.
Of course, there's more to Copilot than just these basic features. In the next section, we'll explore some of the new features that were recently added to the Copilot app experience.
Other Recent Additions to Copilot
As Copilot continues to evolve, Microsoft is incorporating more and more features into the mix with the intent of providing a one-stop shop to support a wide variety of common business tasks. Let's have a look at some of these new features.
Copilot Search
Over the past several years, the broad search capabilities of Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) have evolved quite a bit. Now, with Copilot replacing the default Office.com landing page, users have a new Copilot-powered search experience simply known as Search.
As you can see in Figure 4, Search can be used to find files, meeting notes, chat messages, and heck, even people across your organization. I find this combined search experience to be especially handy these days since I can never seem to remember where conversations tool place (e.g., over email, Teams messages, meetings, etc.).
Figure 4: Performing Complex Searches with Copilot Search
Custom & Purpose-Built Agents
As noted in the previous section, Microsoft is making the Copilot app experience a one-stop shop for every agent in your organization, not just the ones built by Microsoft.
In addition to the default Chat agent, you also have access to a number of purpose-built agents tailored to help out with more nuanced tasks. For example, the new(ish) Researcher and Analyst agents are particularly helpful when conducting complex research and analysis tasks.
We also have the option of extending and/or creating custom agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio as shown in Figure 5 below. These agents can be developed using a wide range of knowledge sources and can be tailored to automate many routine tasks.
Figure 5: Building and Extending Agents in Copilot Studio
Notebooks
Another welcome addition to the Copilot app is the new Notebooks workspace shown in Figure 6 below. Notebooks can be a great place for coworkers to utilize Copilot to share knowledge and collaborate on small projects.
Figure 6: Collaborating in the New Notebooks Experience
Creative Tools
For creative tasks, the Create workspace can be used to develop all kinds of multimedia content including images, graphics, and even video. Compared ot other creative tools you may have worked with, what sets this experience apart is that Copilot can reference your organization’s existing documents and internal content. This helps ground the creative process in the materials your team already uses, making it easier to produce work that aligns with your projects and context.
Figure 7: Designing Images and Graphics Using Create
How Copilot is Faring Against the Competition
As we noted earlier, there's a LOT of competition in the Copilot/AI assistant race. Within the enterprise space, Microsoft's three biggest competitors are:
Note: If you're a Microsoft 365 customer, then you might narrow this list of competitors down to two since Gemini has limited utility outside of Google Workspace (Google's competing solution to Microsoft 365 formerly known as G Suite).
Pricing
From a pricing standpoint, Microsoft has positioned Copilot to compete directly with tools like ChatGPT and Claude. At $30 per user per month, Copilot sits firmly in the same tier as ChatGPT Team/Enterprise and Claude Team/Enterprise. That pricing may feel steep at first glance, but it’s important to remember that Copilot isn’t just another standalone AI model—it’s a deeply integrated extension of the Microsoft 365 experience.
This integration is one of Copilot’s most significant advantages. Because it’s built directly into Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and the broader Microsoft Cloud, Copilot works where people already spend their time. And unlike general-purpose AI assistants, Copilot is grounded in your organization’s own data through Microsoft Graph. This gives it the ability to reason across documents, messages, meetings, and workflows in a way that external tools simply cannot replicate without significant custom integration.
That said, a fair comparison shouldn’t stop with the major AI assistants. Many organizations are also weighing Copilot against more specialized, AI-driven tools. These might include creative platforms like Canva, modern notetaking and knowledge tools like Mem or Evernote, or even higher-end creative suites like the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Copilot isn’t positioned to fully replace all of these solutions, and in many cases it shouldn’t. However, its breadth of functionality—content creation, summarization, image generation, data analysis, meeting capture, task support, and more—can help you consolidate parts of your tool stack and reduce the overall number of licenses you have to maintain.
Jack of a Lot of Trades, Not Always a Master of Everything
Realistically, Copilot is not the absolute best tool for performing every AI-powered task imaginable. Some competitors will outperform it in niche areas, whether that’s deep creative design, long-form reasoning, or specialized workflow tools.
But, in terms of competition, Copilot packs an impressive amount of capability into a single license, with new features and improvements showing up on a near-monthly basis. For many organizations, that combination of breadth, integration, and ongoing evolution makes Copilot a solid bet for building your AI strategy—even in a crowded and rapidly maturing market.
Is Copilot Right for Your Organization?
Stepping back and looking at the big picture, it’s fair to say that Microsoft hasn’t gotten everything right with Copilot. The product has grown quickly, the branding has shifted more than once, and the broader vision—for Microsoft and for customers—is still taking shape. That’s not necessarily a criticism; it’s simply a reflection of where we are in the AI adoption curve. Agentic AI has made remarkable strides over the past two years, but these are still early days in terms of understanding how to apply these capabilities to everyday work in consistent, meaningful ways.
User expectations are shifting, organizations are experimenting with new workflows, and the tools themselves continue to evolve at a rapid pace. The Copilot experience you see today will look different six months from now, not because Microsoft keeps wanting to tinker with things, but because everyone is still learning what “AI at work” should actually feel like. And that’s true across the entire industry, not just for Microsoft.
So, is Copilot right for your organization? At the risk of being the obnoxious consultant, the reality is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. The right solution will vary based on your existing tools, your data landscape, your culture, and the types of work your teams perform.
With all that being said, perhaps the two most important questions to ask yourself are:
Which AI platform is best positioned to provide my organization with the foundation it needs to grow its AI footprint?
Does the AI platform I'm targeting support my users naturally and reliably throughout the flow of their workday?
These are undoubtedly big decisions to make at a point in time where it's incredibly important to get your AI strategy right. And while every organization’s situation is different, placing a bet on Microsoft is a strong one. The company is investing heavily across the entire Microsoft Cloud to ensure that Copilot becomes the engine for the next generation of productivity and collaboration tools. Microsoft’s roadmap makes it clear that Copilot is not a temporary add-on but rather a core part of how they see the future of modern work taking shape.
Closing Thoughts
Copilot has come a long way in just two years, and it continues to evolve as organizations learn more about where AI can genuinely enhance work. The product still has room to grow, and Microsoft will no doubt refine both the experience and the underlying capabilities as customer needs become clearer. But even with ongoing changes, the direction is becoming easier to understand. Copilot is gradually becoming a standard part of the modern workplace, especially for organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Here at Bowdark, we decided to bite the $30-per-user-per-month bullet for our entire user base earlier this year. This certainly wasn’t because we enjoy adding new line items to the budget. However, as pilot users kept finding practical ways to use Copilot to work more efficiently, it became clear that the value was already showing up in our day-to-day work long before we finished doing the math.
And that’s really the heart of the decision for most organizations. No single tool will solve everything, but Copilot can offer a solid foundation for teams looking to build a more connected and efficient workplace. As you shape your AI strategy, the key is choosing the platform that aligns with your goals and supports the future you want to create. Copilot may not be perfect, but for many, it represents a meaningful and approachable step toward more intelligent work.
