Microsoft 365 Copilot

What it is

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant for Microsoft's productivity apps. Jared Spataro announced it for Microsoft on 16 March 2023 as "your copilot for work". It combines large language models with a customer's business data in Microsoft Graph.^[1]

Origins

Its models included GPT-4, and the product was introduced as a copilot for work that combines these models with a customer's business data.^[1]

The launch also introduced Business Chat, which works across the user's calendar, email, chats, documents, meetings and contacts. Business Chat was renamed Microsoft 365 Chat in September 2023.^[1][2]

Main features

Copilot was built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with plans to extend it to Viva and the Power Platform.^[1]

Microsoft stated that "Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts."^[1]

In July 2023 Microsoft priced the product at $30 per user per month.^[3]

Microsoft 365 Copilot became generally available to enterprise customers on 1 November 2023, initially for customers with more than 300 licences.^[2][3][4]

Position in development

In January 2025 the Microsoft 365 app and website were renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot.^[3]

In March 2026 Microsoft unified the commercial and consumer Copilot efforts under EVP Jacob Andreou. Ryan Roslansky, Perry Clarke and Charles Lamanna lead the Microsoft 365 apps and the Copilot platform.^[5]

Where it appears

The product is built into the applications that most office workers already use. In Word it works with documents, in Excel with spreadsheets, in PowerPoint with slides, in Outlook with email and in Teams with meetings and chats. Business Chat, the cross-application chat experience, adds a single place to ask questions across the user's own calendar, email, chats, documents, meetings and contacts.^[1][2]

How the business data is used

The product combines large language models with a customer's data in Microsoft Graph, which is the layer through which Microsoft 365 services expose an organisation's mail, files, calendars and other content. The model answers using that content, and the company stated that the models were not trained on tenant data or prompts. The distinction between using data to answer a question and using it to train a model is central to how enterprises judge such tools.^[1]

Licensing and availability

The product was offered on a per-user subscription basis, and the price was set in July 2023. Its early availability was limited to organisations with a large number of licences, which allowed Microsoft to roll out the service in stages to large customers before smaller ones.^[3][4]