Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft's AI assistant across Windows, Microsoft 365, Edge and Bing
Overview
Microsoft's AI assistant across Windows, Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams), Edge and Bing -- free tier plus Microsoft 365 Premium ($19.99/mo) for individuals and Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30/user/mo) for business, now running GPT-5.6.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Windows, Edge, Bing access
- Limited daily usage
- No Microsoft 365 grounding
- Copilot in Word/Excel/PPT/Outlook
- Priority model access
- 6TB storage + M365 apps
- Pre-built agents (Researcher, Analyst)
- Work IQ
- Usage analytics
- Grounded via Microsoft Graph
- GPT-5.6 + Claude model options
- Teams/Outlook/Graph integration
Use cases
What you can produce with Microsoft Copilot
- A structured recap of a 60-minute Teams meeting — decisions, action items, owners, and due dates — generated automatically without manual note-taking
- A polished first-draft business email or lengthy email-chain summary produced directly inside Outlook from a short natural-language prompt
- A complete PowerPoint presentation skeleton (slides, speaker notes, layout suggestions) created from a one-paragraph brief in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint
- A data analysis of an Excel dataset — trends identified, charts generated, and plain-English explanations written — without writing a single formula
- A low-code customer-service chatbot built in Copilot Studio that handles FAQ routing and escalates complex cases to a human agent
- A DALL-E-powered illustrative image generated inside a Microsoft 365 document or presentation; embedded text, logos, and labels are often unreliable and usually need manual replacement
- A cross-app workflow automation in Power Automate — e.g., auto-filing incoming emails into SharePoint folders — designed and configured via natural-language instructions
ASEAN Perspective
Microsoft Copilot in Southeast Asia
Ships wherever Microsoft 365 operates, with regional data-residency options via Microsoft cloud — attractive for ASEAN enterprises with PDPA/data-sovereignty needs. Free consumer Copilot is broadly available across the region.
Copilot is the AI most office workers meet first, simply because it's already inside Windows, Word, Outlook and Teams rather than living in a separate tab. The free tier covers basic chat and summarizing; Microsoft 365 Copilot grounds answers in your own email, documents and meetings via Microsoft Graph, and as of July 2026 runs OpenAI's GPT-5.6 rather than last year's models.
The gap between licensed and used is the real story: Microsoft counts 20 million-plus paid enterprise seats and says over 90% of the Fortune 500 have bought in, but independent surveys put weekly active usage at only 20-30% of those seats. Copilot Pro for individuals is being retired August 1, 2026, folded into the pricier Microsoft 365 Premium. For Microsoft-standardized orgs, still the default to test first.
What people say
On paper, Copilot scores well: strong marks on Gartner Peer Insights and a high rating on the iOS App Store, with reviewers crediting Teams meeting summaries, Outlook draft replies and PowerPoint generation as features that actually save time. G2's rating sits close behind, though on a noticeably thin review base for a product installed this widely.
The consumer side tells a rougher story. Trustpilot reviews for the free/individual product hover low, dragged down by hallucinated answers and sticker shock over the $30-a-seat business add-on -- which, stacked on an existing Microsoft 365 license, can roughly double what a seat costs. A Gartner survey of 123 IT leaders found only 4 reported significant measurable value from their Copilot rollout, about 64% cited governance and security overhead, and roughly three-quarters said staff struggled to build the habit of using it daily.
Enterprise adoption numbers look enormous from a distance -- Microsoft counts 20 million-plus paid seats, with single companies like Accenture running hundreds of thousands -- but independent estimates put actual weekly usage at just 20-30% of licensed seats, meaning a lot of what gets counted as "adoption" is unused inventory. The pattern across reviews: genuinely useful for the Microsoft 365 tasks it was built for, oversold as a general-purpose reasoning tool, and priced in a way that makes IT departments do the math twice before rolling it out further.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Started life as 'Bing Chat' in February 2023 before the Copilot rebrand
- Now multi-model — runs OpenAI GPT-5/5.5 and, for commercial customers, Anthropic Claude
- Microsoft is building its own in-house model, 'Polaris', for Copilot
- Reached ~420M monthly active users by early 2026
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Microsoft Copilot's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Microsoft Copilot unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to Microsoft Copilot directly →
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