Microsoft Copilot for Business
Making the most of Microsoft Copilot for Business
Microsoft Copilot is reshaping how practically every job role within organisations across every sector work — not by replacing people, but by increasing productivity and freeing them to do their best work.
If your organisation has invested in Microsoft Copilot licenses, you may have seen the icon appear in your Microsoft applications. You might even have been tempted to experiment with using Copilot, but are you making the most of the productivity benefits?
If you don’t have access to Copilot, the information here and in related pages will help you develop your business case to give to your decision makers.
Here, we take a look at what Microsoft Copilot is and where it can help you. You will also find links to pages which detail how Copilot is already being used in different sectors and by different job roles.
Microsoft Copilot doesn't ask your people to work differently — it meets them inside the tools they already use every day, quietly amplifying what they're capable of across every role, every function, and every sector. Whether you're just beginning to explore what AI can do or ready to build intelligent agents that transform entire business processes, the potential is extraordinary — and the journey starts sooner than you might think.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Your AI companion, built into the tools you already use.
Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant embedded throughout Microsoft 365 and the wider Microsoft ecosystem. It works with your real organisational context — your documents, emails, meetings, and data — helping people at every level think faster, communicate more clearly, and get more done without switching tools or changing how you work.
There are four levels of engagement, starting with what is available today and scaling to purpose-built AI solutions that transform entire business processes, so whether you’re just starting out or ready to build sophisticated automated agents, there’s a level of Copilot that fits where you are today and grows with you.
START – Copilot Chat
Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s free AI assistant, available to any organisation that already has a Microsoft 365 subscription. It operates as a conversational interface — think of it as a highly capable AI colleague you can ask questions, give writing tasks, or use to analyse information. It comes in two modes: a web-grounded version that draws on public internet knowledge, and a work-grounded version that can reference your organisation’s own Microsoft 365 content including emails, Teams messages, files, and calendar entries.
This is the natural starting point for any organisation beginning its AI journey. It requires no additional procurement, no deployment project, and no significant change management effort. Employees can start using it within days of it being enabled. Common uses at this level include drafting and editing documents, summarising lengthy email threads, generating first-cut ideas, researching topics, and asking questions about internal content without digging through files manually.
Who it suits
Copilot Chat is genuinely useful for any knowledge worker, but it tends to deliver the most immediate value for people who spend significant time writing, researching, or catching up on communications. It is also the ideal way to build organisational familiarity with AI before committing to the next level of investment.
What it costs
Copilot Chat is available at no additional cost to all Microsoft Entra ID users with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. If your organisation already pays for Microsoft 365, the Start level costs nothing beyond the existing subscription. The only caveat is that using AI agents at this level — for example, building a simple automated workflow — requires an Azure subscription and is billed on a consumption basis, though the costs are typically modest for light use.
__________
EXTEND – Copilot Studio Agents
The Extend tier moves beyond individual productivity and into organisational automation. Using Copilot Studio — Microsoft’s low-code agent-building platform — your organisation can create AI agents that operate as expert knowledge hubs, automate multi-step processes, and connect directly to your line-of-business systems such as CRMs, ERPs, HR platforms, and service management tools.
Where the Buy tier helps individuals do their existing jobs more efficiently, the Extend tier starts to change the nature of what is possible. An HR team can build a self-service agent that answers employee policy questions at any hour of the day without a human ever being involved. A customer service operation can deploy an agent that handles first-line queries, pulls in CRM history, and resolves routine issues autonomously. A finance team can create an agent that connects to their ERP, monitors for anomalies, and surfaces risk signals before they become problems.
Agents can be deployed inside Microsoft Teams, on internal intranet pages, or, for customer-facing scenarios, on external websites. They can also be triggered autonomously based on events, such as a new form being submitted, an email arriving from a key account, or a data threshold being crossed. Importantly, agents built within Microsoft 365 Copilot for internal employee use are included within the Buy tier licence, so the Extend cost only becomes relevant when you need to build more sophisticated agents or publish them to external channels.
Who it suits
The Extend tier is the right conversation to have once you have established the basics of Copilot usage at the Buy level and have identified specific business processes that could be automated or significantly transformed. It is particularly powerful for HR, IT, customer service, and operations teams where there are high volumes of repeatable queries or process steps that do not require human judgement.
What it costs
Copilot Studio is sold as a tenant-wide licence, with capacity packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits priced at $200 per pack per month (approximately £160). Usage is also available on a pay-as-you-go basis, billed at $0.01 per Copilot Credit. The credits consumed depend on the complexity of the agent and the interactions it handles. For example, a simple FAQ agent that draws on a knowledge base uses far fewer credits than a sophisticated agent making multiple API calls to external systems.
For practical planning purposes, a straightforward internal agent handling around 5,000–10,000 employee interactions per month would typically sit within a single capacity pack. More complex, high-volume agents — particularly those deployed to customers — will consume more, and organisations should work with a partner to model expected usage before committing. The pay-as-you-go option is a sensible starting point for piloting, as it avoids upfront commitment whilst you establish real usage patterns.
BUY – Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot is the full in-the-flow-of-work upgrade. Where Copilot Chat is a standalone interface you go to when you need help, the Buy tier embeds AI directly into every Microsoft 365 application you use throughout the day. In Outlook, it summarises and drafts emails. In Teams, it takes meeting notes, captures actions, and lets you ask questions about anything discussed in any meeting you attended or missed. In Word, it drafts, rewrites, and summarises documents. In Excel, it analyses data, creates charts, and explains formulas. In PowerPoint, it builds presentations from documents and briefings. In OneNote and Loop, it organises thinking and meeting outputs automatically.
The key difference from the Start level is depth of integration and contextual intelligence. Copilot at this level does not just answer questions; it actively participates in your workflow. It knows what meetings you have today and what was discussed last week. It can see that the document you are writing connects to a project your team has been discussing in Teams. It brings that understanding to bear on everything it helps you with, making its outputs significantly more relevant and useful than anything a standalone AI tool could produce.
Who it suits
The Buy tier is the core licence for any employee who works primarily in Microsoft 365 applications and whose productivity would benefit from AI assistance throughout the day. This is the right level for most knowledge workers across every function described in the associated pages: executives, salespeople, marketers, finance analysts, HR managers, IT professionals, and operations teams.
What it costs
Microsoft 365 Copilot is available in the UK at £16.10 per user per month. This is an add-on licence and requires an eligible underlying Microsoft 365 subscription — Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, or E5. The previous 300-seat minimum for Copilot was removed in late 2024, so organisations of any size can now access it.
To illustrate the total cost picture: a team of 50 users on Microsoft 365 Business Standard (around £9.60 per user per month) adding Copilot at the promotional rate would be paying approximately £1,170 per month for those 50 licences, before any volume discounts a Microsoft partner might negotiate. It is worth noting that Microsoft has confirmed a global pricing adjustment effective 1 July 2026, with increases across several Business and Enterprise plans, so locking in annual pricing before that date may represent a meaningful saving.
As a practical point, many organisations do not roll out Copilot to every employee at once. A phased approach (starting with the teams most likely to demonstrate clear ROI, such as sales, finance, or HR) is generally more successful both commercially and in terms of adoption.
__________
BUILD – Custom Agents & Apps
The Build tier is for organisations that want to create purpose-built AI solutions that go beyond what pre-built tools and low-code platforms can deliver. Using Azure AI Foundry, development teams can build custom AI models, integrate with proprietary data sources and enterprise databases, design complex multi-agent workflows, and create AI-powered applications tailored precisely to how the business operates.
This is not the starting point for most organisations, and it should not be positioned as such. The value of the Build tier lies in solving specific, high-value problems where the ROI justifies a more substantial investment: a manufacturer building a predictive quality agent trained on years of production data; a financial services firm creating a custom risk model; a logistics company automating complex routing decisions. In these scenarios, the returns can be transformational, but the investment in development, data preparation, and ongoing maintenance is correspondingly significant.
Who it suits
The Build tier is relevant for larger organisations with mature technical capability, or for organisations working with a specialist partner on a defined use case with a clear business case and measurable outcomes. It requires development resource, data infrastructure, and a thoughtful approach to governance and responsible AI. It is worth being realistic: most organisations will find that the Start, Buy, and Extend tiers deliver considerable value before they ever need to consider a full custom build.
What it costs
Build-tier costs are highly variable and cannot be meaningfully quoted as a per-user rate. They are shaped by the complexity of the solution, the volume of AI inference required, the data infrastructure involved, and the development time needed to build and maintain the solution. Azure AI Foundry is billed on a consumption basis through Azure, and all associated development, data engineering, and operational support costs need to be factored into the business case. For an organisation evaluating this tier, the right first step is a detailed scoping exercise with a Microsoft partner who can model both the costs and the potential returns specific to the problem being solved.
A note on the investment journey
The four levels described above are not sequential hurdles — they are a spectrum, and different parts of the same organisation may sit at different levels simultaneously. A sensible starting point for most is to enable Copilot Chat at the Start level for all users immediately, identify the teams or roles where Microsoft 365 Copilot at the Buy level will deliver the clearest productivity gains, and run a structured pilot to build the evidence for broader rollout. The Extend and Build tiers follow once that foundation is established and specific automation opportunities have been identified.
The pricing conversation, whilst important, should always sit alongside the ROI conversation. Microsoft’s own modelling suggests that AI saving just two hours per week per seller — by streamlining research, preparation, follow-ups, and RFP responses — translates to ten additional opportunities pursued per year per seller, and across fifty sellers that represents millions in additional gross profit without increasing headcount. The same logic applies across every function: the question is not whether the investment is affordable, but whether the return justifies it. In almost every case, for organisations willing to invest in proper adoption, it does.
That is exactly where DeeperThanBlue comes in.
Where can I find Copilot?
Copilot does not ask you to change how you work. It lives inside the tools your teams open every morning — and whatever your role, the AI is already there, waiting to help.
Depending on the license your company provides, Copilot might appear in any or all of the following applications:
Word · Excel · PowerPoint · Outlook · Teams · OneNote · Loop · Forms · Planner · Power BI · Power Automate · Whiteboard · Copilot Chat · Copilot Pages · Copilot Studio · Azure AI Foundry · Researcher Agent · Analyst Agent · Facilitator in Teams · Word Agent · PowerPoint Agent · Excel Agent
Let DeeperThanBlue help you find the value in Microsoft Copilot
As a Microsoft Business Partner, we have the experience of getting the most out of Microsoft products, so whether you’re just starting out with Copilot or are ready to make its Agents work harder for you, we’re ready to work with you.
+44 (0)114 399 2820
info@deeperthanblue.com
Get in touch
