Your first week with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Where it shows up, what the licence actually changes, and what to try first.
Jamie Owen Updated 26 Sept 2026 fast-moving: check a current source
Prices are Microsoft's published US figures. What your organisation pays depends on its own agreement.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot licence does two things. It puts an assistant inside the apps you already use, and it gives that assistant permission to read your work content: mail, meetings, files. The second part is what the money buys. Plenty of tools can draft text, and only one with access to your own material can tell you what you missed in yesterday’s meeting. If you’re not sure which Copilot you’ve been given, check which Copilot is which first, because everything below assumes the paid one.
Where you will meet it
Copilot turns up in two shapes. Inside each app it has its own button and a panel that opens beside what you are working on: in Word it drafts and rewrites in the document, in Outlook it summarises long threads and drafts replies that know what the thread said, in Teams it recaps meetings, live or afterwards, provided the meeting was being transcribed. Excel gets formula help and data analysis, PowerPoint gets first-draft decks.
The other shape is the Copilot app on its own, signed in with your work account. It was the Microsoft 365 app until Microsoft renamed it the Microsoft Copilot app, and Microsoft is moving its web addresses to copilot.cloud.microsoft. That is the chat that searches across everything at once rather than working on one open file, and it is where Notebooks and Pages live, for gathering source material and for keeping the output somewhere colleagues can edit it.
Since August 2026 that chat has a Work IQ button at the top left, Work IQ being Microsoft’s name for Copilot’s reach into your mail, files and meetings. It starts switched on. Switch it off and you get answers from the web alone, which is worth doing on purpose for a general question and worth checking for when an answer ignores your own documents.
Microsoft moves these controls between releases, so look for the Copilot name rather than a position you remember from a screenshot. What you see at all depends on what your organisation has switched on: some features start switched off and stay that way until an administrator changes it, which is why a colleague’s Copilot may offer something yours does not.
Worth trying in week one
Start with recall rather than creation. “Summarise my unread mail from this week”, “what did I miss in yesterday’s project meeting”, “find the document where we agreed the Q3 budget”. These play to the one advantage the licence actually buys, and you can check every answer against the source in seconds.
Then try drafting from your own raw material: a one-page update from your bullet points, a reply in your usual tone. The Copilot prompting habits transfer directly, and naming the file or the meeting you mean beats hoping it picks the right one.
Judge Copilot on the tasks only it can do, meaning the ones grounded in your own content. Generic questions are better asked of any capable chatbot.
What it costs, honestly
Your employer pays this, not you, but the number explains why licences get rationed. Microsoft’s own US pricing, checked on 26 September 2026, lists the licence for large organisations at US$30 per person per month on a yearly commitment, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan, which is where it launched. Organisations of up to 300 people can buy Microsoft 365 Copilot Business instead, listed at US$21 and discounted to US$18 for the first year on yearly deals signed between 1 July and 31 December 2026. Microsoft notes that its web prices “may not reflect the actual list price” in your country, and large organisations negotiate their own.
Remember that Copilot Chat, which most business plans include at no extra cost, may already be enough for colleagues who never need it to search their files, and some of them now get a limited Copilot inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well. See which Copilot is which for where the lines fall.
Two cautions before you lean on it
Quality is uneven across the apps. Summarising in Outlook and Teams is the mature, reliable end. Generated PowerPoint decks still need heavy rework. Calibrate app by app rather than judging the whole licence on whichever one disappointed you first.
And before pointing it at anything sensitive, read where Copilot sends your data. Your prompts and the files Copilot reads stay inside your organisation’s own separated area of Microsoft’s cloud. Your web searches do not.
Sources
Everything above was checked against these on 26 Sept 2026. Providers change things without notice. If a detail matters to a decision, follow the link.