Microsoft just rolled out Copilot Chat to all Office 365 business users for free. It shows up as a sidebar in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. Sounds generous, right? It's not. This is classic drug dealer tactics - give away the lite version to get people hooked.
I've been testing this for about two weeks since they gave our company early access. The free version is basically ChatGPT with Office integration. It can't touch your SharePoint files, can't read your emails from last month, can't analyze your OneDrive documents. It's just web search with Microsoft branding.
But here's the thing - even the lite version is surprisingly useful. I was working on a PowerPoint deck last week and asked it to suggest questions the audience might ask. It actually read my slides and came up with decent questions I hadn't thought of. Not revolutionary, but helpful enough that I used it.
In Excel, it helped me clean up a messy dataset with some VLOOKUP formulas I'd forgotten how to write. In Word, it rewrote some corporate-speak nonsense into actual English. The document context awareness works better than I expected.
The real Copilot - the $30/month version - can dig through all your company data. It'll summarize email threads, analyze meeting transcripts, and search across SharePoint like a smart assistant. I tried it at a client's office and it's legitimately powerful. Also legitimately expensive when you're paying for 500 employees.
Microsoft's auto-installing this thing starting in October whether you want it or not. IT admins can block it, but it's enabled by default. They're also cramming Copilot into Edge, Teams, and every other Microsoft product. Resistance is futile, apparently.
I asked our IT director about the rollout. His exact words: "Great, another thing employees will use for three weeks then forget about, except now they'll complain when we don't upgrade to the paid version."
He's probably right. Once people get used to having AI help with mundane Office tasks, they'll want the version that can actually access their work files. Microsoft knows this. They're banking on user addiction to drive enterprise upgrades.
The free version is good enough to be useful, not good enough to replace the paid features. It's like giving someone a Honda Civic when they really need a pickup truck. Sure, it gets you around, but you'll want something bigger once you realize what you're missing.
Microsoft claims the responses are "30% longer and 11% more helpful" with the latest updates. That's the kind of metric only a product manager would cite. What matters is whether it saves you time or makes your work better. In my experience, it does both, but only for simple tasks.
Bottom line: if you're stuck using Office anyway, the free Copilot is worth trying. Just don't expect miracles, and prepare for your company to get hit with upgrade prompts once employees start depending on it.