At $30/user/month on top of M365, Copilot is the most expensive mainstream AI seat. One month of daily use told us exactly which roles justify it.
Microsoft 365 Copilot costs $30/user/month on top of an existing M365 subscription, making a fully-loaded knowledge worker seat roughly $60/month. That's triple a ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro seat. The pitch: AI inside the tools your company already lives in, with your company's own data via Microsoft Graph. After a month across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Outlook, our answer is: earned for some roles, indefensible for others.
PowerPoint is the killer app. Generating a structured first-draft deck from a Word brief took 6–9 minutes to a genuinely usable state — work we clocked at over two hours manually. For anyone producing weekly decks, that single workflow covers the subscription. Teams meeting recaps with action items were the second standout; Outlook thread summarisation the third. All benefit from Graph grounding: Copilot cites your own files, which generic assistants cannot see.
Excel Copilot remains the weakest module — fine for formula suggestions and basic analysis on clean tables, unreliable on messy real-world spreadsheets, where it either declined or produced wrong pivots in a third of our tasks. Word drafting quality trails Claude noticeably in blind judging. And the whole product presumes your data hygiene is good: Copilot grounded on a chaotic SharePoint surfaces chaos.
| Seat | Cost | Compare |
|---|---|---|
| M365 Copilot | $30/user/month + M365 | Requires annual commitment on many plans |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20/user/month | No Office integration, broader model access |
| Claude Pro | $20/user/month | Better prose; no native Office hooks |
Buy it for deck-heavy, meeting-heavy roles — consultants, PMs, executives, anyone producing weekly PowerPoint. Don't blanket-license the whole company: our modelling suggests most organisations get better economics giving 20–30% of staff Copilot and the rest a $20 assistant. Run the numbers for your team in our ROI Calculator.
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