Microsoft has announced that Copilot will be available on November the 1st 2023. Unfortunately, Microsoft is only targeting the initial release at enterprises as revealed in a document titled:
Microsoft 365 Copilot General Availability FAQ for partners. In essence it says:
Availability will be worldwide, in the public clouds, and customers will be able to transact via the EA/EAS/MCA-E channels.
the document also addresses the question:
Why are we not making the SKU available in Direct and CSP channels?
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an amazing new technology, but we are all learning together. To ensure
a smooth integration process, we’ve decided to start by introducing it to our Enterprise and
SMC-Corporate customers via EA/EAS/MCA-E.
there will also be minimum purchase requirements, also highlighted in the document:
Is there a minimum number of seats customers should buy?
Yes, customers must buy at least 300 seats of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
It is disappointing to see many claim, even some well respected identities in the SMB space, that Microsoft is not delivering Copilot to SMB. The reality is that the SMB space has always had to wait for technologies to trickle down and Copilot will be no different.
As I understand it, Copilot and AI in general, places a lot more load on the back end servers and much of this cannot be cached like normal searching can. Also, Microsoft doesn’t have a true indication of the load users will place on cloud infrastructure when it starts to be used in production. They therefore want to bring this load on in a controlled manner to avoid failure, which would not be good or profitable for a new service like Copilot.
Thus, there are many technical and business reasons for limiting the roll out of Copilot to the customers. There is significant demand in all areas for the technology but it needs to both prove itself and pay its way before it is widely adopted. That means that those in SMB are going to wait a little longer before it becomes available as a direct purchase. It does not mean that Microsoft won’t be delivering to all audiences, it just means people will need to be patient.
I would point you back to the features that have been added to Microsoft Business premium over time. At release of this product it didn’t include technologies like Entra ID P1 or Defender for Business. However, they did come to the product. Perhaps they didn’t arrive as soon as people would have liked but they did arrive and we are reaping the benefits today.
There is no doubt that the demand for Copilot is significant. There is no doubt that will will benefit the SMB market. However, it is incorrect to say Copilot will not be available for the SMB market. It will just require a little patience for it to become available, which to be honest is probably a good thing to let others work the kinks out.
CIAOPS 
CoPilot seems to me to be more about summarizing piles of data than about analyzing specific pieces of data. That seems to say to me that one needs dozens of people or hundreds of people preparing data that needs to be summarized. That sounds like E3 and E5 licenses, not business licenses with a maximum of 300 licenses. On the other hand, Bing Search with Chat GPT is more suitable for individual users and a maximum of 300 licenses. Just my current thoughts. Hope that helps.
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I would suggest that every tenant, large and small, has a vast array of information inside, much of which has value inside that most businesses are not fully taking advantage of. the challenge is, most people don’t have the skills with products like Excel for example, to produce pivot table reports. Copilot is going to be able to do the heavy lifting allowing people to better utilise the tools and data they have. Only Copilot works with your internal data, both ChatGPT is Ning Search only work on public data. ChatGPT is also 2 years out of date, whereas Copilot will return results from all your, data old or new.
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