Most businesses on Microsoft 365 already have Copilot, whether or not anyone decided to roll it out. Copilot Chat comes with the business plans at no extra cost, and since late 2025 it has sat in the side panel of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Because the free version is already in place, the decision left is who needs the paid version and what the free one should be doing in the meantime.
We are a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Cardonet is Certified in the Claude Partner Network, so we deploy Copilot and the alternatives to it.
What Copilot Chat does
Copilot Chat answers from the web and from whatever you give it: text you paste, a file you upload, or the document open in front of you in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Microsoft describes it as content-aware, which in practice means you can ask it to condense, rewrite or question the file you are working on.
Because Copilot Chat does not search your work, it cannot find last month's proposal in SharePoint, sum up a Teams meeting you missed or pull together what everyone has said to a client across your mailbox. That search across your work is the line between free and paid.
| Copilot Chat | Microsoft 365 Copilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Comes with Microsoft 365 business plans at no extra cost | A paid seat |
| Answers from | The web, text you paste, a file you upload or the document open in front of you | All of that, plus the email, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive content the signed-in person can open |
| Where it works | The side panel of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote | Inside the applications as well as in chat |
| Who it suits | People whose AI use is mostly drafting or rewriting what is in front of them | People who find and combine information spread across mail, meetings and files |
What it protects
When people sign in with their work account, Copilot Chat runs with what Microsoft calls enterprise data protection. Prompts and responses are not used to train the underlying models, and they are logged and retained so they can be audited and searched in the same way as your other Microsoft 365 data. Web searches it runs on your behalf go to Bing, which Microsoft says handles them separately from the prompts themselves.
That makes Copilot Chat, on a work account, the free and approved alternative to personal ChatGPT accounts for most everyday drafting. At no extra cost to a business already paying for Microsoft 365, it is the same move set out in ChatGPT Free, Plus, Business and Enterprise. The condition is the sign-in: the consumer Copilot on a personal Microsoft account runs under different terms, so the rule has to be that work happens on the work account.
What the paid version adds
Microsoft 365 Copilot adds your work data. Across email, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, it searches what the signed-in person can open and answers from it, inside the applications as well as in chat. That is what makes it good at catching up on a thread you were copied into late, recapping a meeting, finding the document someone mentioned last week or drafting from three sources at once. It also brings Microsoft's built-in agents, of which Researcher is the best known.
Who needs a seat
A paid seat earns its cost for people whose work depends on finding and combining information spread across mail, meetings and files. That usually means people in many meetings, people who manage client relationships across long threads and people who assemble documents from material other people hold.
It earns much less for people whose AI use is mostly drafting or rewriting what is already in front of them. Copilot Chat does that well, and a seat bought for them is paid for every month of an annual commitment whether they use the extra or not.
Four steps to decide who gets a seat
- Give everyone Copilot Chat on their work account, pin it where they will see it and write it into the policy as the approved tool for everyday drafting.
- Run the month that follows as a test. The usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center shows who uses it, and the people who keep asking it things it cannot see are your first candidates for a seat.
- Check what those people can reach, and tighten it, before the paid version is switched on for them.
- Measure their work against a before, and widen to the next group only when the first one relies on it.
What the seats cost, and what you pay for around them, is set out in what Microsoft 365 Copilot costs. How Copilot compares with Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini is in Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot.
Where this fits
Making Copilot Chat the approved everyday tool, under company sign-in, is part of Govern. Choosing who gets a paid seat, checking what they can reach and showing them how to use it on their own work is Adopt, with the first month of training built around exactly those people.