When most people hear “digital twin”, they picture an engineer running a virtual copy of a jet engine, or watching a simulated factory floor hum along on a screen. It sounds like something built for heavy industry, a long way from a business that runs on email, spreadsheets and the occasional frantic search through old files. I’ve come to think the idea fits an ordinary organisation just as well — and that most of us are far closer to having one than we’d assume. The raw material is already sitting there. We’ve just never thought of it in those terms.
A digital twin of a business isn’t a 3D model. It’s a living representation of how your organisation actually thinks: the decisions it has made, the reasons behind them, the way a job quietly moves from one person to the next. That knowledge already exists. The problem is that it’s scattered. Some of it sits in SharePoint, some in a Teams thread nobody has opened in a year, some buried in a colleague’s sent items — and an uncomfortable amount lives only inside one person’s head.
You already own the knowledge
A while back I watched someone spend half a morning answering a question their business had already answered twice. The work existed. It simply couldn’t be found quickly enough, so they built it again from nothing. That’s the everyday cost of not having a twin you can talk to. You’re not short of information. You’re short of a way to ask your own business what it already knows.
This is where Copilot starts to shift things. Connected across your Microsoft 365 tenant, it lets you put a question in plain language and pulls the thread together for you. Ask why a particular client moved onto a different plan, and Copilot can surface the Outlook email where it was decided, the meeting where it was thrashed out, and the document that recorded the outcome. A new staff member can ask it how something is normally done and get an answer drawn from real history, not folklore. You stop hunting for a file and start interrogating your own past.
The twin is only as good as what you feed it
This is where most businesses come undone. If a decision gets made on a phone call and never written down, the twin can’t see it. If the reasoning lives only in someone’s memory, it isn’t in the model. So the habit worth building is unglamorous but powerful: put decisions somewhere Copilot can reach. Keep the Teams meeting recap instead of letting it disappear. Write the why into the document, not just the what. Treat a SharePoint page or a Loop component as the place your thinking genuinely lives, rather than a tidy-up job for later.
None of that is technical work. It’s a discipline — choosing to treat your own knowledge as something worth keeping, instead of something you’ll cobble back together under pressure when you next need it.
What it actually buys you
I don’t think the goal is a perfect replica. No model captures everything, and you wouldn’t want one that tried. But a business that can answer its own questions — one that remembers why it did things — moves faster and argues less. It brings new people up to speed sooner. It stops relitigating decisions that were settled months ago.
The pieces are already sitting in your tenant, waiting to be connected. What I’m watching now is which businesses bother to feed the twin, and which keep solving the same problem every Tuesday morning, none the wiser for having solved it before.
CIAOPS 