Microsoft Copilot has now been available to Microsoft 365 business subscribers for long enough that the early adopter experience is giving way to a more measured assessment of what the product actually delivers in practice, as opposed to what the marketing promised.
The picture that emerges from businesses that have deployed it, including SMEs that have shared their experience with Northstar is more nuanced than either the enthusiastic vendor narrative or the sceptical dismissals suggested. There are genuine use cases where Copilot delivers consistent, measurable value. There are others where the gap between promise and reality remains significant.
Where Copilot is genuinely delivering
*Meeting summaries and action tracking
The Teams integration that generates meeting summaries, captures action items and produces follow-up notes is consistently the most positively received feature among business users. For organisations with frequent internal or client meetings, the time saving is real and the output quality is generally adequate for the purpose.
The caveat is that this only works where meetings are conducted in Teams with recording and transcription enabled. Organisations that conduct meetings in other ways, or where participants are uncomfortable with recording, will not benefit.
*Email thread summarisation
For individuals managing high volumes of email, the ability to summarise a long email thread and extract the key points and required actions is genuinely useful. The quality is variable, it performs better on straightforward factual threads than on complex, nuanced conversations, but for the majority of business email the summarisation is adequate and time-saving.
*First-draft generation for structured documents
Copilot’s ability to generate a structured first draft of a report, proposal or presentation from a brief or an existing document reduces the blank-page problem significantly for roles that involve regular long-form writing. The drafts require meaningful editing before they are suitable for external use, but the acceleration of the drafting process is real.
Where Copilot is underdelivering
*Data quality dependency
Copilot’s ability to answer questions about your organisation, “summarise the key points from our Q3 sales reports” or “what did we agree in the last client review?” depends entirely on whether the relevant information is in your Microsoft 365 environment in a form Copilot can find and process.
Most organisations’ SharePoint and Teams environments are not organised in a way that supports this kind of retrieval. Files are poorly named, folder structures are inconsistent, and large amounts of relevant information exist in email attachments that are not indexed effectively. The result is that Copilot either cannot find the relevant information or retrieves the wrong information confidently.
*Inconsistent output quality across user types
The productivity gains from Copilot are concentrated in specific roles and tasks. For someone who spends significant time writing, summarising, and processing information, Copilot can deliver meaningful efficiency gains. For someone whose work is primarily operational, client-facing or involves physical activity, the benefit is minimal.
Licensing all users in an organisation to achieve benefits for a subset of them is not always the right commercial decision, and it is not a decision that Microsoft or an MSP with a licensing margin incentive will make on your behalf.
*The data governance prerequisite
This is the issue that Northstar most consistently flags to clients considering Copilot. The product works by accessing the information your users are permitted to access in the Microsoft 365 environment. If your permissions are not properly configured and in most SMEs they are not, Copilot can surface content that should not be visible to that user.
This is not a minor technical detail. It means that before deploying Copilot, organisations should conduct a review of their Microsoft 365 permissions, ensure that sensitive content is appropriately protected, and confirm that the information Copilot will access on behalf of each user is information they should legitimately be able to see.
The honest assessment for SMEs
Copilot is a good product that delivers real value in the right context. It is not the universal productivity transformation that Microsoft’s marketing suggests, and it is not a product that every user in every organisation will benefit from equally.
For UK SMEs evaluating Copilot, the right approach is to identify the specific roles and use cases within your organisation where the benefit is most likely to be real, pilot the product with those users before committing to broader licensing, ensure your Microsoft 365 environment and permissions are in a suitable state, and take independent advice before committing to the licensing cost. Anyone telling you Copilot is definitely right for your business without understanding your specific workflows, your data environment and your team structure is selling, not advising.