​

If You’re a Microsoft 365 Customer, Copilot Chat Could Be Your Starting Point

Post 1 of the series: Starting with Copilot Chat

Why Microsoft 365 customers should default to the AI they already have.

​

Why we started this exploration

There is an uncomfortable reality sitting underneath much of today’s AI adoption.

The vast majority of people using AI productivity tools are not getting meaningful, sustained value from them. This includes users of ChatGPT.

In most cases, a tool is accessed, people begin using it immediately and that is where the journey ends. There is little education, no structured approach and limited understanding of how to work with AI rather than simply asking it questions. The result is predictable. AI is used in a simplistic way, outputs feel helpful in the moment, but real productivity gains fail to materialise.

This is not a prompt problem. It is an approach problem.

We see this daily in our work at Koshima across organisations in the GCC and the UK. Despite widespread awareness and experimentation, many teams are effectively still at square one when it comes to using AI properly for real work.

At the same time, ChatGPT has become the most visible and widely used AI tool inside organisations, often adopted informally and without configuration. Leaders frequently only become aware of this usage when questions around data handling, confidentiality, or non-disclosure agreements arise.

Rather than speculate or rely on assumptions, we decided to step back and properly test Microsoft Copilot Chat. Not as a demo. Not as a marketing exercise. But as a real user, doing real work, under the same pressures our clients face.

This exploration is also timely. Microsoft made Copilot Chat available at no additional cost to Microsoft 365 customers in early 2025, positioning it as a secure, enterprise-ready starting point for AI adoption inside the tools people already use.

This post is the starting point of that exploration.

​

The reality most organisations are living with

AI adoption inside organisations has happened bottom‑up, not top‑down. Individuals experiment first. Governance and policy follow later.

This creates a quiet mismatch. On one hand, organisations have clear obligations around data handling, confidentiality and compliance. On the other, employees are using tools that sit outside the environments those obligations were designed around.

This is rarely malicious. In most cases, people simply do not know where the boundaries are.

The result is an uncomfortable realisation for many leadership teams. The way AI is being used day‑to‑day does not always align with the way the organisation is expected to operate.

​

Introducing Copilot Chat. The overlooked default

For organisations already using Microsoft 365, there is an important fact that is often missed. Copilot Chat is already available.

It is the free version of Microsoft Copilot provided to Microsoft 365 customers. It includes a familiar conversational chat interface and for the majority of everyday knowledge‑work tasks, is comparable in capability to ChatGPT.

You can ask questions, give instructions, upload documents within limits, refine outputs and iterate just as you would expect from a modern generative AI tool.

The difference is not capability. The difference is context.

Copilot Chat is not an add‑on tool. It lives inside the Microsoft 365 environment organisations already rely on.

​

Why starting here matters

Every Microsoft 365 customer has already made a trust decision.

Documents, emails, calendars and business data already sit inside Microsoft’s platform. That trust is formalised through enterprise agreements, security controls and compliance frameworks that organisations have accepted, reviewed and built processes around.

Copilot Chat inherits that trust model by default.

From a practical perspective, this changes a lot:

• There is far less need to move information in and out of separate tools
• Context stays where the work already happens
• In most cases, compliance questions are reduced rather than increased

This will not apply to every organisation. Highly regulated industries and edge cases do exist and some requirements are complex or idiosyncratic.

But for the vast majority of Microsoft 365 customers, Copilot Chat sidesteps a large portion of the data and compliance concerns that emerge when AI tools sit outside the core work environment.

​

What Copilot Chat looks like in practice

At a high level, Copilot Chat behaves exactly as most people expect a modern AI assistant to behave.

It supports tasks such as:

• Drafting and refining written content
• Summarising documents or policies
• Creating structured outlines, questions, or frameworks
• Reviewing content critically from a specific perspective

For most everyday knowledge‑work scenarios, there is no meaningful capability gap at the chat level.

This is important, because it removes the assumption that starting with Copilot means compromising on usefulness.

​

Copilot Chat goes beyond chat

The chat interface on its own is only part of the story.

Copilot Chat also operates inside Microsoft 365 applications, where it gains awareness of the work object you are already interacting with.

At a very high level:

• In Outlook, it can help users understand, prioritise and respond to emails without copying content into another tool
• In Word, it supports summarising, reviewing, and improving documents directly inside the file being worked on
• In Excel, it helps users interrogate data, spot patterns and create new structures without advanced spreadsheet expertise

We will explore this properly in later posts. For now, the key point is simple. When Copilot has context, its value changes.

​

Productivity expectations versus reality

One uncomfortable truth sits underneath much of the current AI conversation. The vast majority of people using AI productivity tools are not getting meaningful value from them.

This includes users of ChatGPT.

In most cases, the tool is downloaded or accessed, people start using it immediately and that is where the journey stops. There is little or no education, no structured approach and no understanding of how to work with the tool rather than simply asking it questions.

The result is predictable. AI is used in a simplistic way. Outputs feel helpful in the moment, but they do not translate into sustained productivity gains.

This is not a prompt problem.

It is an approach problem.

Effective use of AI is not about having a single good prompt. It is about having the right approach, supported by appropriate prompting techniques, that align to the task someone is actually trying to complete.

This gap is one of the main reasons we started this exploration. Despite widespread usage of tools like ChatGPT, many organisations are still effectively at square one when it comes to real AI-driven productivity.

When AI is disconnected from how people actually work, and when people are not shown how to apply it to their tasks, adoption stalls and value leaks away.

​

What this series will cover

This post sets the foundation. The rest of the series builds on it with practical observations from real use.

• Post 2. Copilot Chat vs ChatGPT free. Why one often feels better and the other often works better
• Post 3. Copilot Chat inside Microsoft 365 apps. Where real productivity begins to appear
• Post 4. Security, trust, and compliance. Why this conversation can no longer be avoided
• Post 5. Why Copilot succeeds or fails. The role of contextual, task‑based enablement

​

Closing thought

This series is not about promoting one tool over another.

It is about helping organisations make better starting decisions.

If you are already a Microsoft 365 customer, Copilot Chat is the logical place to begin your AI productivity journey. The rest of this series explains why.