I’ve been using Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 for about two and a half months now, and I figured it was time to actually write down what I think. Not the marketing version. Not the "future of work" pitch deck. Just what it’s like using this thing every day at Spektra Systems.
We enabled Copilot for M365 in mid-November 2023, shortly after it went generally available on November 1. Our team runs on Microsoft 365 pretty heavily (Teams calls all day, Outlook overflowing, Word docs and PowerPoint decks constantly flying around), so we were a natural fit for early adoption. We started with licenses for about 15 people across leadership, product, and sales.
Here’s what I’ve found after living with it.
Quick Refresher: What Copilot for M365 Is
Copilot for M365 is Microsoft’s AI assistant built into the Office apps you already use. GPT-4 under the hood, combined with Microsoft Graph (basically the data layer connecting your emails, files, calendar, chats, and meetings). It shows up in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote.
The license is $30 per user per month, on top of your existing Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license. Not cheap. I’ll come back to whether it’s worth it.
Teams Meeting Summaries: The Killer Feature
I’ll start with the thing that’s made the biggest difference for me.
I’m in a lot of meetings. Like, a lot. As COO, I’m jumping between product reviews, customer calls, leadership syncs, and partner discussions. Some days I have 8-10 Teams calls. Before Copilot, I’d frantically take notes, miss half the action items, and spend 20 minutes afterward trying to remember who said what.
Copilot’s meeting recap changed that. After a Teams meeting (with transcription enabled), you get a summary with the key discussion points, decisions made, and action items with the people they were assigned to. I open the recap, scan it in 2 minutes, done.
Is it perfect? No. It sometimes attributes a comment to the wrong person, especially when people talk over each other. But it’s right about 80% of the time. Good enough to be useful every single day.
The real win is the meetings I can’t attend. I used to ask people for a summary, and they’d send me three vague bullet points two days later. Now I just pull up the Copilot recap. Game changer.
Outlook: Hit and Miss
I had high hopes for Copilot in Outlook, and the results are mixed.
Email drafting works okay for straightforward stuff. "Draft a reply accepting this meeting and asking about the agenda" or "Write a polite follow-up on this thread." It picks up context from the chain, uses a reasonable tone, and gives you something you can send after minor edits. Saves me 2-3 minutes per email, which adds up when you’re handling 80+ a day.
Where it falls short: anything sensitive or complicated. When I need to push back on a proposal without burning a relationship, Copilot’s drafts are too generic. I end up rewriting most of it. It’s like having a well-meaning intern draft your emails. The structure is fine, the content needs work.
The "summarize this thread" feature is better though. Long email chains where I’ve lost track 15 replies deep? Copilot gets me oriented faster than scrolling through the whole thing.
Word: Surprisingly Useful for First Drafts
This one surprised me. I was skeptical because I figured, how much can it really know about what I want to write?
I tested it on a customer proposal. Told Copilot to draft based on our previous SOW (in my OneDrive), adjusted for a new customer’s requirements. It pulled relevant sections from the old document, adapted the language, and gave me a 3-page draft that was maybe 60% there. A document that normally takes me an hour, and I got a working first draft in 90 seconds.
I wouldn’t trust it for anything customer-facing without heavy editing. But as a starting point, it’s saved me real hours.
PowerPoint and Excel: Not There Yet
I’ll be blunt. These are the weak spots.
Copilot in PowerPoint generates slides, but the quality is… okay at best. I tried it for an internal quarterly review. The structure was reasonable, but every slide looked like a default template with bullet points. No charts from our actual data, no visuals that told a story. Just text on slides. I’ve basically stopped using it for creating presentations. It’s slightly useful for condensing a 30-slide deck into 10, but that’s about it.
Excel is worse. The promise is natural language questions about your data, but it only works with perfectly formatted Excel tables. Our real-world spreadsheets with merged cells, inconsistent headers, and multiple data ranges? Copilot kept saying it couldn’t process the data. When I set up a clean test dataset, it worked fine. But that’s not how real business data looks.
I think both will improve, but right now, I’m not getting much value from either.
The $30/Month Question
Is it worth $30 per user per month?
For me personally, yes. The Teams meeting summaries alone save me at least an hour a week. The Outlook and Word features add another 30-45 minutes. At the COO level, that time savings easily justifies the cost.
For our sales team, worth it too. They use email drafting and meeting recaps heavily.
For everyone else? Less sure. A developer who spends most of their day in VS Code isn’t getting $30/month of value from Copilot in Word. An engineer in maybe 2 meetings a day doesn’t need AI meeting summaries as badly as I do.
My recommendation: start with the people who live in Teams and Outlook. Don’t buy licenses for your entire company just because Microsoft’s pitch deck looks amazing. For Spektra (about 200 people), we’re spending $450/month on 15 licenses. Expanding to the whole company would be $6,000/month. Hard to justify given how uneven the value is across roles.
What I’m Watching For
Microsoft is shipping updates pretty frequently. The product today is noticeably better than what we turned on in November.
I’m hopeful PowerPoint and Excel get real upgrades. If Copilot could generate a presentation that doesn’t look like a college student’s first attempt at slides, that would be huge. I also want better cross-app integration. I’d love to say "summarize this week’s meetings and draft a status update in Word" without prompting separately in each app.
My Honest Take
Copilot for M365 is useful, but it’s not the productivity revolution that Microsoft’s marketing suggests. Not yet. It’s more like having a reasonably smart assistant who’s good at some tasks, bad at others, and sometimes makes mistakes you need to catch.
The gap between the demo and reality is real. Microsoft’s demos show Copilot doing amazing things with perfect data. My actual workday involves messy data and complex asks, and the results are more modest.
But I keep using it. Every day. And that says something. If you’re on the fence, get a few licenses for your power users and evaluate after a month. See what sticks.
Do let me know in the comments if you’ve been trying Copilot for M365. I’m curious whether your experience matches mine.
Happy building, folks!
Amit
Assisted by AI during writing
