Which Copilot is which?

Someone where you work bought a product called Copilot, and that tells you almost nothing about what you can do with it. Microsoft puts the name on a consumer app, on two different work assistants, on a tool for building your own, and on a code editor for developers. Ten minutes spent sorting out which one is on your screen changes what you can safely ask it.

Two words do most of the work below. Web-grounded means the assistant answers from what the model learned during training, plus whatever it can look up online. Work-grounded means it can also read your own mail, meetings and files. Your tenant is your organisation’s own separated area of Microsoft’s cloud, which is where that work content already sits. Which side of that line you are on decides most other questions, including what Copilot can see.

The renaming

Microsoft is partway through renaming the work products. As of 26 September 2026 its administrator documentation says Microsoft 365 Copilot “is now named Microsoft Copilot” and the free chat Microsoft Copilot Chat, while its pricing pages still sell Microsoft 365 Copilot. The consumer assistant was already called Microsoft Copilot, so the same two words now name a free app for your personal life and the licence your employer bought. What tells them apart is the account you sign in with: a personal Microsoft account gets the consumer product, your work account one of the work versions below.

The map

• Microsoft Copilot on a personal account, at copilot.microsoft.com or in the app: web-grounded, consumer terms, and no connection to your employer’s tenant.
• Copilot Chat, included with most business Microsoft 365 plans at no extra cost per person. You sign in with your work account and it is covered by what Microsoft calls enterprise data protection, so your prompts are not used to train the model. In the app it answers from the web and from whatever you attach. Inside Outlook it goes further: since Microsoft’s July 2026 update it can read your inbox, calendar and meetings, and some of your files, without the paid licence.
• The paid licence, Microsoft 365 Copilot, which the documentation now calls Microsoft Copilot, and the one people mean when they say the rollout cost money. It puts Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams with priority access, plus a work-grounded chat that reaches your mail, files and meetings across your tenant’s boundary.
• Copilot Cowork: the part of the paid licence you hand a whole multi-step task to rather than a question. Billed by usage on top of the seat, “seat” being the industry’s word for one person’s licence.
• Copilot Studio: the place where colleagues build agents for other people to use.
• GitHub Copilot: a separate product for writing code, bought separately.

Between the free chat and the paid licence there is now a middle step. Some people without the licence get what Microsoft calls “standard access” to Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote: the drafting and analysis features, but no work-grounded chat, and slower when the service is busy. “Copilot+ PC”, on Windows laptops, is a hardware badge rather than any of these.

How to tell which one you have

Look for the label first. Microsoft says Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and the Copilot app now show your version, with labels such as “Copilot Chat (Basic)”, “Copilot (Basic)” and “Copilot (Premium)”. Premium is the paid licence, and every data question on this site applies to you.

No label? Test it outside Outlook. Open the Copilot app with your work account, check that the Work IQ button at the top left of the chat is on (it switches work content on and off), and ask about a file you have not attached: “find the document where we agreed the Q3 budget”. The paid licence searches your files for it. Copilot Chat cannot, so it answers from the web or asks you to attach the document.

Since July 2026 even the free Copilot Chat can read your inbox inside Outlook. An answer drawn from your own email no longer proves you have the paid licence, so trust the label.

Which one you have was not your decision, and changing it is not yours either. Licences are assigned by whoever administers Microsoft 365 where you work, usually IT. Depending on their settings the app may let you request one, and since September 2026 those requests land on their own page in the admin centre. Either way, it is a conversation with them rather than a setting to go looking for.

One name, more than one model

The paid licence no longer means one model underneath. By default Copilot picks a model for each prompt, and a model menu lets you choose Quick response, Think deeper or a named model instead. Anthropic’s models only appear if your organisation has switched them on; Microsoft says they “aren’t available to all users by default”. In August 2026 Word for the web added Claude Sonnet 5 to that menu, as the default for what Microsoft calls “higher reasoning tasks”.

So two colleagues can get different answers to the same prompt, and “Copilot said” now needs a follow-up question. Where the choice includes Claude, Sonnet and Opus differ in how hard they think rather than in how much they can read at once.

If you have just been given the paid licence, start with the first-week guide. For the two features whose names cause the most confusion after the products themselves, see Notebooks and Pages.