A common misconception I find with SMB customers is the belief that they need Copilot for every user in their organisation. This therefore makes Ai adoption inside the business prohibitively expensive, especially, as currently Copilot requires an annual commitment.

A better approach is to identify the one or two users inside a business who would benefit the most from Copilot and give them licenses. Of course the question then becomes, which users? The secret to answering that question is to firstly identify the things that Copilot does well and match that to those requiring those features inside a business.

So what does Copilot do well? I would suggest that AI in general does three things really well that users can benefit from. The first is creating new material. That is taking a blank page or document and creating a new document based on the corpus of information already inside a tenant. The second thing that Copilot does well is summarise information. Copilot can take particularly dense document and web pages and provide a summary of the most important points. The final point where Copilot really shines in my books is summarising meetings in Teams.

Once we know what he tool does well, we can then match to business needs. A good example maybe those inside a business that have a need to create new marketing or sales material. Rather than having to always create this material from scratch Copilot could assist in this creation process by utilising existing material. Jobs that involve working with detailed product documentation or contracts may also be an avenue where Copilot can lighten the load by quickly summarising information. Finally, many businesses using Microsoft Teams daily for meeting with staff and with customers, so having an AI generated summary of the meeting along with tasks and follow ups could be real time saver.

Importantly, Copilot is a tool and the best utilisation of any tool is to place in the hands of people who will benefit the most from what the tool can do to help them get their work done. Unfortunately, I’ve seen Copilot assigned to users based on ego (aka, “I have have AI”) who never actually use it in their daily process and thus fail to appreciate the huge benefits and time saving it can provide.

So rather than seeing Copilot for Microsoft 365 as an ‘everyone’ license initially try and identify those users in a business who will gain the most benefits from what teh tool is really good at doing and give them the license and train them on how o get the most from it. I would suggest this provide the real productivity benefits of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to the whole business allowing additional licensed to be added over time.

There is however an alternate strategy that can be adopted to buying individual Copilot licenses for a select group of users. Many are not aware that you now tied Copilot Studio to an Azure PAYG subscription (I have previously written about this concept with the Power Platform)and use this to develop an agent that can be published into Microsoft Teams so that all users can benefit directly from Copilot. Stay tuned for an upcoming article on how you can do just that.