Demystifying Microsoft Copilot: Real-world Use Cases & Experience

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and modern work leads planning a Copilot rollout who need clarity on licensing, oversharing risk and where custom or extended Copilots deliver value beyond the out-of-the-box experience.

Guest: Kevin McDonnell — Copilot Strategy and Modern Workplace AI Lead, Avanade

Kevin McDonnell, Microsoft MVP and Copilot Strategy and Modern Workplace AI Lead at Avanade, joins Tom Arbuthnot to cut through the Copilot branding and explain which Copilot is which, how licensing has opened up, and what real custom Copilot builds look like. The conversation covers data protection, oversharing risk, Graph connectors and where agentic actions are heading.

Key insights

• Start people on the free web/Edge Copilot (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) — the commercial data protection promise is already included in E3, E5 and the F1/F3 frontline licences, so it costs nothing to switch on and is a safe place to practise prompting before paying for anything. ▶ 3:11
• Copilot in Windows' early wins are accessibility-related — dark mode, icon colours, read-aloud — which technologists dismiss, but Microsoft's own data shows accessibility settings get almost no discovery because users don't know they exist. A text prompt removes the need to find the setting. ▶ 4:46
• Excel Copilot is weak at manipulating data but strong at explaining and applying features: McDonnell's example is conditional formatting in natural language — it identifies the column and applies the rule, unlocking capabilities users know exist but can never find. ▶ 6:17
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 is $30 per user per month and can now be added to Business Premium as well as E and M licences — Empowering.Cloud, at six people, could not buy it before that change. Edu is available; frontline has had no announcement, and $30 per frontline worker is unlikely to fly. ▶ 7:19
• Copilot knows who you are and surfaces everything you have access to, so the governance and oversharing conversation returns — expect the same knee-jerk reaction organisations had when they simply turned Delve off. Get comfortable with your permissions before deployment. ▶ 8:53
• McDonnell categorises the (reportedly 157) Copilots into three buckets: universal ones for everybody (Microsoft Copilot, Copilot in Windows, Copilot for M365), role-specific ones (Power Platform, Dynamics 365, GitHub), and scenario-based ones you extend or build yourself — then start from the business problem, not the technology. ▶ 10:24
• A practical custom Copilot build: download the Ignite sessions via the Ignite API (~400 videos), transcribe them, index with Azure AI Search using cognitive skills to extract speakers and topics, then front it with Copilot Studio or the Teams AI Library as a Teams app for pro-code control. ▶ 15:30
• Cost warning for these builds — blob storage for the videos is pennies, but transcription bills per minute and AI Search adds more, so don't leave a bulk loop running overnight without watching your credits. The Microsoft Startup Program hands out substantial Azure credits for testing. ▶ 17:02
• Graph connectors already index beyond Microsoft 365 — on-premises file shares, and ServiceNow knowledge bases are the classic case — and the Copilot for M365 extension model is being reused as the extension model across the other Copilots. ▶ 18:34
• The next evolution is Copilots taking actions rather than just reading data (sales Copilot can already log opportunities without a form), which creates a new governance problem: if a user says 'book travel' or 'raise a ticket', you must decide which of several back-end systems to route to and which plugins to permission for whom. ▶ 19:39

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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