Microsoft Copilot: Is It Worth Learning?

Short answer: if your company is paying for it, yes. If you'd be paying for it yourself, probably not yet.

Long answer follows.

Microsoft Copilot is AI integrated into the Microsoft 365 apps you already use: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. Instead of switching to ChatGPT in another tab, you use AI right inside the application. In theory, this is brilliant. In practice, it's... uneven.

I've been using Copilot daily for about six months. Here's my honest assessment.

Where Copilot is genuinely good

Outlook

This is Copilot's strongest showing. Drafting email replies, summarising long threads, catching up on emails you've missed... it does all of these well. "Summarise this thread" on a 30-message email chain saves real time. "Draft a reply declining this meeting politely" produces something I'd actually send with minor edits.

If you do nothing else with Copilot, use it in Outlook. That alone might justify the licence cost.

Teams meetings

Copilot in Teams can transcribe meetings, generate summaries, and answer questions about what was discussed. "What action items came out of this meeting?" or "What did Sarah say about the timeline?" after a meeting is genuinely useful. It's not perfect at speaker attribution, but it's better than my notes.

If you missed a meeting, Copilot can give you a summary without anyone having to brief you. This is the kind of thing that sounds minor but saves thirty minutes of "can someone update me on what was discussed?"

Word (for first drafts)

"Draft a proposal for [topic] including sections on [X, Y, Z]" produces a reasonable starting point in Word. Not a final document. Not even close. But a structure with initial content that you can edit is faster than staring at a blank page.

The "rewrite" feature is useful too. Select a paragraph, ask Copilot to make it more concise, or more formal, or clearer. Like having an editor sitting next to you.

Where Copilot is middling

Excel

Excel Copilot can write formulas, create charts, and analyse data. When it works, it's great. The problem is it doesn't always work. Complex requests sometimes produce errors or formulas that don't quite do what you asked. For straightforward spreadsheet tasks, it's helpful. For complex data work, I still find ChatGPT's Advanced Data Analysis more reliable.

The formula generation is the strongest feature. "Write a formula to calculate the year-over-year percentage change for each product" usually produces exactly what you need.

PowerPoint

Copilot can create presentations from prompts or Word documents. The results are... fine. Not ugly, but not impressive. The designs tend to be generic, heavy on stock imagery, and light on the kind of visual storytelling that makes a presentation actually good.

For internal presentations that need to exist but don't need to look amazing, it's a time-saver. For client-facing or executive presentations, you'll want something better (Gamma, for instance).

Where Copilot is weak

Complex reasoning

Ask Copilot to do something that requires thinking across multiple documents, synthesising complex information, or making nuanced judgments, and it struggles more than standalone tools like Claude. The integration into Office apps means it's optimised for quick, in-context tasks rather than deep analysis.

Knowing your organisation

Copilot can search across your Microsoft 365 data (emails, documents, Teams chats) to find information, which is clever in theory. In practice, it sometimes surfaces irrelevant results or misses things that a proper search would find. It's getting better but it's not there yet.

Price

£24 per user per month, on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription. For a large organisation, that's a significant investment. Some companies are seeing clear ROI. Others are paying for licences that go unused.

The honest comparison with ChatGPT / Claude

Here's what I tell the companies I work with:

Use Copilot for: Quick, in-context tasks inside Office apps. Email drafting, meeting summaries, simple document drafting, basic spreadsheet work. Things where the integration matters more than the AI quality.

Use ChatGPT/Claude for: Complex analysis, long-form writing, research, coding, creative work, and anything where you need the best possible AI output regardless of which app you're in. These are more powerful AI models with more flexibility.

They're not competing tools. They're complementary. I use Copilot for the small stuff and ChatGPT/Claude for the big stuff. The small stuff adds up though, and that's where Copilot's integration advantage really shows.

Should you learn it?

If your company provides it: Yes, absolutely. It takes about an hour to learn the basics. Spend 30 minutes trying it in Outlook and 30 minutes trying it in whichever app you use most. You'll know within that hour whether it's useful for your specific workflow.

If your company doesn't provide it but you're curious: Try the free version of Copilot first. It's not the same as the M365-integrated version, but it gives you a sense of the AI quality. If you like it, lobby IT for licences. Best argument: "It'll save me X hours per week on Y tasks." Be specific.

If you're deciding between learning Copilot and learning ChatGPT/Claude: Learn ChatGPT or Claude first. They're more versatile and the skills transfer to Copilot. Copilot is essentially a less powerful AI in a more convenient wrapper.

The one thing to do today: if you have Copilot, open Outlook, find a long email thread, and type "summarise this conversation" in the Copilot panel. If you don't have Copilot, ask your IT team whether it's available or planned. Either way, you'll know where you stand in about five minutes.