r/microsoft_365_copilot

An MSP gave me their working estimate from the field: 25 to 30% of Copilot licences go unused where the rollout arrived without enablement. Their number, not mine, and it matches what I walk into.

Warren Buffett put it well. "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

The licence is the price. The hours a person actually saves are the other half, and most businesses I meet can quote the first to the penny while having never measured the second.

Pull your licence report this week and count the seats with no activity in 30 days. That number is your real starting point.

I've recently been exploring the new GitHub Copilot harness in Microsoft Copilot Studio and comparing it with the standard harness.

I'm curious to hear from others who are already testing or working with the new experience.

Do you think Microsoft will eventually retire/deprecate the standard harness and move Copilot Studio completely toward the GitHub Copilot harness?

1. Or do you think both will continue to coexist because they serve different use cases — for example, standard harness for more predictable/rule-based agents and GitHub Copilot harness for more autonomous, reasoning-heavy and multi-step agents?
2. For organizations that already have production agents built using topics, flows, connectors and existing Copilot Studio capabilities, how are you thinking about the long-term architecture? Are you continuing with standard harness or starting to design new agents around the GitHub Copilot harness?
3. Has anyone seen any official Microsoft communication, roadmap item or documentation suggesting that the standard harness could eventually be deprecated?

One more important question:

What sources do you follow to stay ahead of Copilot Studio changes?

With Microsoft adding more AI options, I feel like the naming alone is starting to get confusing 😅

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, paid Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Cowork represent three distinct capability levels with three distinct value and cost profiles. Copilot Chat is a secure, no-additional-cost AI entry point for eligible users. The paid Copilot license is a full enterprise AI platform with deep organizational context. Cowork is an advanced agentic layer for complex, multi-step work, available only to paid license holders and billed on usage.

Our recommendation: start with a clear-eyed assessment of your current Microsoft 365 environment before choosing a Copilot path. Know your permissions structure, your data governance state, and your user readiness level. That assessment will tell you more about which capability is right for your organization than any feature comparison chart will.

I put together a breakdown of the differences if anyone wants it, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat vs Paid Copilot vs Cowork but I’m mostly curious how people are actually using these in real environments?

I’m getting the upgraded Microsoft 365 Copilot license through work and want to make sure I actually take advantage of it.

I work primarily out of email, but a big part of my job also involves managing and refining processes across Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, trackers, and recurring workflows.

For context, I’m not a coder and don’t have an operations/IT background. I’m more of a business/process-oriented user, so I’m especially interested in ways Copilot can help someone like me automate, streamline, and improve the way I work without needing to know how to code.

For those of you who are heavy Copilot users:
What are the best tips, tricks, prompts, or workflows you’ve discovered that have actually changed the way you work?

I’m particularly interested in:
Outlook: managing a high volume of email, drafting responses, summarizing long threads, identifying action items, prioritizing emails, follow-ups, etc.
Excel: analyzing large trackers, finding inconsistencies/errors, summarizing data, building formulas, creating reports, or automating repetitive analysis
Word: reviewing/editing documents, comparing versions, extracting information, creating standardized documents
Teams: meeting summaries, action items, follow-ups, and turning discussions into actual work products
Cross-app workflows: taking information from emails → Excel → Word → Teams without manually copying everything
Process improvement: using Copilot to identify repetitive steps and figure out ways to streamline them
Prompts: specific prompts you use repeatedly that consistently produce great results
Hidden/underutilized features: anything you think most Copilot users don’t know about

I’m not looking for the basic “summarize this email” type of tips. I’m looking for the power-user stuff that has genuinely saved you hours or fundamentally changed how you approach your work.

If you have a workflow you use every day, walk me through it. I’d love to steal your best ideas and build them into my own workflow.

Bonus points for specific prompts you’re willing to share.

I’d been receiving the “I’m not able to answer that right now, to continue this conversation choose another model” issue that seems to be going around after multiple days of heavy Opus use. I assumed I’d hit some invisible token limit but submitted a ticket with my company IT to have them look into it anyway, who in turn submitted a ticket to Microsoft.

Well a Microsoft engineer replied to the ticket stating the following:

“We recognize that the updates to priority access for Opus 5 were not communicated clearly and may have caused frustration.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot user subscription license provides priority access to multiple models in Chat, with different levels of access when specific models are selected. Auto is designed to maximize value and availability by automatically selecting the most appropriate model for the task. Users who choose advanced models in Chat, such as Opus 5, may exhaust their priority access with prolonged usage.

We are continuing to learn from usage to improve both our experience and in-product communications. As users wait for their priority access to reset, they can continue working in Auto or move to Cowork. We're also happy to help your team clearly explain the change, its impact, and available alternatives to end users."

idk if that clears anything up for anyone but figured I’d share.

Is there a way that I can organize my Copilot chats? I have some chats that I go back to weekly or even several times a week. For a while it puts ones like I was able to pin chats, but that disappeared.
I really like how ChatGPT has project folders. It would be nice if Copilot had something similar.

Hi, currently I'm using Premium plan, and I have some questions about Claude models:

1. Does Claude models have usage limits like messages per day? And are these limitations consistent across Chat + Agent Mode in Office Apps, or are they separate?
2. How much worse is the performance of Claude in Copilot compared to native Claude? For data aggregation and in-depth information retrieval tasks, I find Opus excellent. I also occasionally code, but I don't need to use Codex or Claude Code.

Thanks for reading this!

I recently started a Project Manager role (two months ago) focused on large healthcare transformation projects.

I’m drowning in data - mostly meeting notes - and need help finding ways to consistently capture, update , and give direction.
 
My Organization uses Microsoft Copilot, the Microsoft 365 application, and Smartsheet for project management
 
Project Meetings are frequently recorded and transcribed by Copilot. I develop agenda. Then take notes manually and document action items in the agendas.
 
Copilot notes and action items are also pasted into the agendas.
 
Multiple meetings cover the same topics  but the meeting goals and audience differ (update leadership, get updated direction, communicate direction to work teams, get updates from work teams, circle back to leadership, etc)
 
Objective: Consolidate all existing information on each  topic (from meeting agendas, meeting notes, copilot meeting recaps, Copilot notes, Plaud notes, ) into a master issue tracking list by project, topic, showing the latest update, by who, and listing due date and dependencies
 
Objective 2 : use the new master list to Build project plans in Smartsheet.
 
Objective 3: automate agenda creation, meeting note capture, and master list snd Smartsheet updates.

I would greatly appreciate your suggestions!  

I am a senior manager in an organisation and I have M365 copilot at my disposal. Every day, In Teams I record meetings, have lots of emails containing things to think about or todo. Papers for meetings. I use planner, todo, SharePoint lists, SharePoint sites and my one note, loop pages or hand written notes To try to help organise my multifaceted responsibilities.

My role means that things are always changing, I delegate things to my direct reports either in an email or a teams convo and the day moves on. I attend committees where I have papers to read and comment on.

I need help, a way to structure this in the best way and then have M365 Copilot help orchestrate things all the time so that at any moment I can see who is looking at what issue, its status or what the next action was for a topic in a meeting.

Has anyone even got close to streamlining their role as a senior Manager in the Microsoft 365 universe?

Which of the Microsoft productivity apps work best withe copilot and has anyone devised a ‘process’ to manage complex accountabilities across teams and not drown in the what do i need to think about today.

And I don’t have an executive assistant - Surely I could build one?

Am I the only one who can’t get copilot to format shapes and text boxes in PowerPoint for me?

Every time I use copilot in PowerPoint, and instruct it to format the shapes and text boxes for me (e.g. evenly space, etc.) it can’t do it. I have tried multiple different prompts etc.

It always offers to give me a new document. No, I want it formatted in the slide. Can copilot really not handle this. Claude connectors in PowerPoint that I use in my personal life can do this. It’s astonishing copilot can’t, or maybe I am just missing something…?

Sometimes I feel like the only one trying to build a really competent AI virtual assistant to help me do my work. I work at a Fortune 500 company, and I have a bunch of clients that I need to do work for, and so I need to be able to track a lot of tasks across a lot of different timelines and clients. To get a really good AI virtual assistant, I feel like that assistant needs access to my Outlook inbox, my Outlook calendar, and some sort of task management or Microsoft To Do app. We have Microsoft Copilot at work, and that can easily see my inbox and my calendar. It even drafts reasonable responses to incoming client emails, using an agent that I built. But here is where I get really stuck, and where I would appreciate your input : Microsoft Copilot CANNOT SEE (OR ACCESS) MY MICROSOFT TO DO APP, AND SO IT HAS NO WAY OF GENERATING DRAFT TASKS FOR ME BASED ON EMAILS I RECEIVE FROM CLIENTS (even though the ToDo app is part of Outlook). To me this seems like a huge oversight on the part of Microsoft, if they want to help me build a virtual AI assistant that can really help me do my job better. Am I the only one stuck with this problem? I have read that Microsoft Planner works better with Microsoft Copilot, but I don’t want to use Microsoft Planner because that’s for teams of people. I am an individual contributor. Any thoughts on any of this? Am I crazy? When I research Microsoft Cowork, it says that that does not have access to the Microsoft To Do app either. But these tasks for clients are actually what I get paid to do, and so it’s just critical that they are created and managed accurately, efficiently, and easily. Do I need some kind of harness or orchestration layer to get this to work properly? How are you using AI to manage tasks in your Outlook environment? Your thoughts and comments are welcome! Have at it.

Bonjour, j'utilise codex au quotidien, et pour avoir tester Copilot il y a un petit moment j'ai été très déçu par le produit, j'ai refait des tentatives sur Azure et d'autres produits 365 et les résultats étaient décevant comparé a codex ou Claude.

J'aimerais avoir des retours de la part d'utilisateur régulier pour savoir si vous amortissez vos abonnements et sur quels sujets vous trouvez le produit adapté comparé aux autres fournisseurs.

Merci.

I have a premium copilot license through my organization. In the middle of very important work that I find only opus can handle, it just started saying "i cant answer this right now, please choose another model"

I cannot find anything in our admin panel about usage limits. What gives?

If theres a limit im fine with that. But id like to be able to actually see this limit and when i can access it again.

https://jellebelletje.github.io/CARA/

I built an adoption readiness assessment for organisations considering Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft publishes checklists for this, but I found them lacking, so I put together something scored instead.

Whoever uses it can download the results as a PDF at the end, without giving an email address or any other private information. There is no signup and no server.

Source: https://github.com/jellebelletje/CARA

MIT and CC BY 4.0.

Feedback on the questions especially welcome.

Hello all. I go through the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the Learn release notes and the Copilot blogs every Friday and write up what actually moved. Here is week 33, covering 7 to 14 August. 36 changes in the window. These are the ones I would not want an admin to miss.

The headline: three roadmap entries were cancelled in seven days

Not delayed. Withdrawn.

499658, Excel =COPILOT function. The worksheet function that would have let a formula generate, classify and summarize text and data directly in a cell. It carried a January 2027 target date. Cancelled.

559614, improved long files navigation using document structure. The change meant to make Copilot aware of document structure so it gives more accurate answers and clearer citations on long files. Cancelled.

501570, replace stock video footage with AI-generated images in Create. Had carried a November 2025 target. Microsoft's own text dates the withdrawal: "Updated August 10, 2026: We have decided not to move forward with this change at this time."

The part that cost me an hour, so it does not have to cost you one.

The roadmap cannot display a cancellation. Open the Status filter and there are exactly three options: In development, Rolling out, Launched. The panel's own counter says All (3), so that is the complete list. A withdrawn entry belongs to none of them, so all three counters read zero.

Which means the card looks normal. Rollout start, release phase and platform list are all left exactly as they were the day before. 559614 still says rollout start July 2026, and its description is written in the past tense, as something that already shipped, before it withdraws the feature two sentences later.

Three checks that actually work:

1. Look for the status chip. A live entry renders one. I used 497999, the agents usage report, as a control because it was updated in the same week: it shows LAUNCHED with a preview date and a rollout start. The three above render no status element at all. Absent, not greyed out.
2. Read the last sentence of the description, not the first. The withdrawal is appended to the end of the original marketing copy, which still reads like a feature on its way.
3. Do not trust the date fields. If you sync roadmap IDs into a spreadsheet and watch dates, a withdrawal is invisible to you. The only field that changes is the description, and it changes at the end, which is the part a summary column truncates.

That is the public card and the public filter panel. I have not checked whether an API field carries a withdrawal, so if you know, say so and I will correct this next week.

What landed on the governance side

Agents usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center (497999). Total active agents and active agent users, users split by licensed and unlicensed, both agents and users segmented by publisher type (user-created, built by your organisation, built by Microsoft, built by Microsoft partners), and reporting down to individual user-agent pairs. The unlicensed split is the one I would open first. It counts agent use by people who hold no Copilot licence at all.

Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance went generally available on 10 August. Related tenants, governance relationships for least-privileged cross-tenant delegated administration, configuration baselines spanning Defender, Entra, Exchange Online, Intune, Purview and Teams, and secure tenant creation. It belongs in a Copilot update because it is the control plane the multi-tenant agent management story sits on, and Microsoft states that capability is still in preview. General availability applies to Tenant Governance itself.

A Copilot Frontier access control is now documented in the admin center. Copilot then Settings then View all then Copilot Frontier. It governs access to experimental and preview features across web apps, desktop apps and agents. The documented default is No access, so nobody reaches Frontier features until an admin changes it.

SharePoint Authoritative Sites is generally available. You can designate sites as official trusted sources, and Microsoft states that classifying a site as authoritative causes its content, such as company news and policies, to be prioritized across Copilot Search.

Picking a Cowork model is now a data-retention decision

Learn documents the full picker: Auto by default, then GPT 5.5 Frontier, GPT 5.6 Sol, GPT 5.6 Terra, Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Fable 5.

Fable 5 is the one with a condition attached. It is in preview, it stays off until an admin turns it on under Copilot settings in the admin center, and it requires data retention, which means prompts and responses for that model are kept by the model provider instead of following Cowork's default no-retention posture. A banner shows while it is selected. There is also an effort control (Light, Medium, High, Extra High, Max) that sets how hard the model works and how quickly it consumes a user's limits, and an admin can switch off the Anthropic model family outright.

If your privacy sign-off for Cowork was written on the basis of no retention, it does not cover every model in that picker any more.

Agents and MCP

Work IQ MCP overview is up, carrying Microsoft's preview banner (not for production use, possibly restricted functionality, supplemental terms). Two lines matter for policy: a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence is required to use Work IQ MCP servers, and admins allow or block MCP servers across the organisation from the Microsoft 365 admin center. The catalogue spans Copilot, Calendar, Mail, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, User and Word servers, plus Windows 365 agents, Fabric IQ Ontology, Dataverse and Dynamics 365. No general availability date is stated and no roadmap ID is cited.

Planner Agent reaches group-based basic plans for Copilot-licensed users, having been limited to premium plans.

Agents and skills from the Plus menu (569213, in development). Insert agents and skills into a prompt from an Agents and Skills tab, reached from Add work content on the plus menu, or by typing / or @.

A LegalZoom agent inside Copilot was announced on 12 August. Available through the Marketplace, but no roadmap milestone and no admin control is named, so there is nothing for tenant policy to point at yet. Microsoft's own footnote states that Copilot does not provide legal advice or legal services.

Shipped to Current Channel this week

Anthropic models are selectable in Word alongside the OpenAI ones. PowerPoint gained three: enterprise assets from a connected Adobe Experience Manager library, starting a deck with Copilot from the web app home screen, and referencing live web sources while creating. Vision can analyze a shared desktop screen and, on mobile, a live camera feed. Outlook got coaching feedback in chat while you draft, applied one suggestion at a time rather than all at once, plus meeting prep in classic Outlook for Windows. Connectors now run content crawl and identity crawl in parallel instead of sequentially, and the ServiceNow Knowledge and Catalog connectors enforce role-based permissions. Teams meetings can be referenced in Copilot Notebooks. And the consumer Copilot app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app are merging into a single app, with personal, work or both sign-ins.

One caution on that whole list. Not one of those release-note entries states a release stage in its own text. They are generally available in the sense the page itself uses: released to Current Channel and still rolling out to a subset of users before expanding. That is not the same as deployed everywhere in your tenant, and I have watched people plan against it as if it were.

In development, worth a date in your tracker

Copilot Chat in Outlook expanding to reason over an entire inbox, calendar and other enterprise data, for Copilot Chat users without a Copilot licence. CSV, TSV, JPG and PNG as knowledge sources in Copilot Notebooks. Proactive push notifications in the mobile app. Ask Copilot on selected PDF text in OneDrive for iOS, October target. Call recaps in the Queues app, September target. SharePoint generating and rendering HTML pages, October target. Language choice for Summarize in classic Outlook, October target. Copilot Studio picking up Dataverse (568929) and Azure SQL as native knowledge sources.

Two things I could not verify, said out loud

Copilot Studio's own what's-new page still ends at June 2026, and the released-versions page it links to has not moved past platform version 2026.6.3 despite stating a weekly Tuesday update. So the two Studio entries above come from the roadmap, not from Studio's own surfaces.

And I am not claiming Claude Opus 4.8 was dropped from the Cowork picker. It is absent from the 14 August model table while another Learn page still records it as a June 2026 addition. Microsoft publishes no diff for either page and no roadmap entry covers a Cowork model retirement, so that is an inference across two pages rather than a documented change. If anyone has a first-party source either way, I would like to see it.

That is week 33. Happy to go deeper on any of these in the comments. And if you watch a board I am not watching, tell me which one, because the Frontier features page carries no per-item dates at all, so anything added or removed there inside a week is undetectable from that surface.

I spent hours setting up a notebook just right. I invited people to share the notebook. Two days later I get an email from one of the people I invited who said now when they click the share link it opens copilot to nothing. I went to cowork and my notebook was gone. Angry I was going to rebuild and I went to the 9 dots at the top of the screen and notebooks is gone as an option.

I did some digging and now it appears that notebooks has moved to OneNote. Now I have to go into OneNote to work on the notebook and share out the pages with everyone from there. Is it staying that way? I didn’t want it in OneNote

For those using Copilot directly inside Excel to reason through large or complex spreadsheets, do you prefer Auto, GPT-5.6 or Opus 5? Have you noticed any meaningful difference in how well they understand and work through the workbook?