If your business runs on Microsoft 365, you’ve probably seen the prompts to add Copilot — Microsoft’s AI assistant that lives inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and the rest. The pitch is compelling: draft emails in seconds, summarize long threads, build spreadsheets from a sentence. But at roughly $30 per user per month, is it actually worth it for a small business? Here’s our honest take.
What Copilot actually does well
Copilot shines at the everyday writing and summarizing work that quietly eats your team’s day:
- Email and documents. Drafting a first version of an email, proposal, or policy from a short prompt — then refining it — is genuinely faster than starting from a blank page.
- Meeting summaries. In Teams, Copilot can summarize a meeting, list the decisions, and pull out action items. For anyone who missed the call, that’s a real time-saver.
- Making sense of data. In Excel, it can explain a spreadsheet, suggest formulas, and spot trends without you needing to remember the exact function.
Where it falls short
Copilot isn’t magic. It works best when your Microsoft 365 data is well-organized — if your files and permissions are a mess, its answers will be too. It also still makes mistakes, so anything it produces needs a human review before it goes out the door. And if your team doesn’t change how they work, those licenses just become an expensive subscription nobody opens.
So, is it worth it?
For most small businesses, Copilot is worth it if two things are true: your team already lives in Microsoft 365 every day, and someone helps them build it into their actual routine. The tool pays for itself when even a few employees save a couple of hours a week — but only if they use it.
That second part is where most rollouts fail. Buying the licenses is easy; getting your team to actually adopt Copilot (safely, without exposing the wrong data) is the hard part.
How we help
That’s exactly what we do. We help Des Moines-area businesses roll out Copilot the right way — sorting out licensing and data permissions first, then training your team with real, practical examples from your own work. No hype, no jargon, just help turning a subscription into hours saved.
Curious whether Copilot makes sense for your team? Explore our AI Solutions or get in touch for a no-pressure assessment.