Is Copilot actually worth the licence money?
Microsoft keeps pushing Copilot in your face, and the licence isn't cheap. Most firms turn it on, poke it twice, and quietly forget it exists.
Where it hurts
Start with the money, because Microsoft doesn't make it obvious. As of July 2026, the small-business add-on (Microsoft 365 Copilot Business) costs £13.80 per user per month ex VAT, paid yearly. That's a first-year offer off the £16.10 list price and it ends on 30 September 2026. It's an add-on, so you need an existing Microsoft 365 Business plan (Basic, Standard or Premium) underneath it, and you can license three people without paying for the other ten. If you're shopping fresh, the bundled Business Standard with Copilot plan at £18.10 a head comes out cheaper than buying the two parts separately.
Second, you already get some of it for nothing. Eligible Microsoft 365 business plans include Copilot Chat at no extra cost: it answers from the web, drafts text and summarises files you upload to it. What the free version can't do is see your email, calendar or company files. The paid licence is what puts Copilot inside Word, Outlook, Excel and Teams, working with your own documents in SharePoint and OneDrive. That's where the real wins are: a long thread caught up in one summary, the first draft of a quote or letter, the key points pulled out of a contract.
So here's my honest frame. The paid seat tends to earn its money for people who live in email, documents and reports. It's usually wasted on staff whose day is spent in a till, a workshop or a job-management system. And if nobody's shown your team what it's actually good at in your line of work, even the right seats end up as expensive novelties.
What I'd build
I'd start with the licence sums: check your base plan qualifies, put everyone on the free Copilot Chat, and buy paid seats only for the people whose week is buried in email and documents. Those seats I'd connect properly to Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and your files in SharePoint, so Copilot works with your real documents. Then the part that actually matters: I'd sit with each person and find the specific jobs it does well in your business, the weekly report it can draft, the threads it can summarise, the letters it can start, and leave a short cheat sheet of the prompts that genuinely save time. A month in we review seat by seat, and any licence that isn't earning its keep gets dropped. If none of them are, I'll say so.
What changes
- Free Copilot Chat for everyone; paid seats only where they'll earn it
- Copilot connected to your own files, not used as a generic web chat
- A short cheat sheet of the prompts that genuinely save your team time
- A seat-by-seat review and an honest call on which licences to keep
Facts on this page last checked 12 July 2026, against microsoft.com, learn.microsoft.com.
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