Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business is an AI-powered productivity add-on that works inside the Microsoft 365 apps your team already uses—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams—to help people draft content, summarize information, analyze data, and turn conversations into action. It’s designed for work: Copilot can ground responses in your organization’s files, emails, meetings, and chats (based on what each user is permitted to access).
Key features & benefits
Write faster, sound sharper: Create first drafts, rewrite, shorten, expand, and polish documents and emails directly in Word and Outlook.
Summarize and stay aligned: Turn long email threads, chats, and meeting conversations into clear summaries, decisions, and next steps—especially helpful for busy teams and distributed work.
Turn data into decisions: Ask Copilot to explain trends, surface insights, and help you interpret spreadsheets in Excel using natural language prompts.
Build presentations from your content: Generate outlines, speaker notes, and presentation drafts in PowerPoint using existing documents and key points.
Works across your Microsoft 365 ecosystem: Copilot leverages Microsoft Graph to retrieve relevant work context (only what the user already has access to) and it honors security controls like Conditional Access.
Security, privacy, and compliance (work-ready AI)
Respects permissions: Copilot only surfaces organizational data the user is allowed to view.
Stays within the Microsoft 365 boundary: Prompts, retrieved data, and responses remain within Microsoft 365 service boundaries; processing uses Azure OpenAI services (not consumer OpenAI services).
Not used to train foundation models: Microsoft states customer feedback is optional and isn’t used to train the foundation models used by Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Licensing & requirements (important)
Microsoft 365 Copilot is typically licensed as an add-on that requires an eligible base Microsoft 365 subscription.