Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, New Features, Business Value and How to Drive Adoption

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, IT decision makers and partner architects who need to give staff a sanctioned AI chat tool without new licence spend, and anyone building an adoption or governance plan for the included Copilot Chat entitlement.

Guest: Gareth Bleasdale — Senior GTM Manager: Modern Work and AI, Microsoft

Gareth Bleasdale, Senior GTM Manager for Modern Work and AI at Microsoft, has moved from Teams telephony and rooms to a full-time focus on driving adoption of the Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat entitlement that comes free with Entra accounts. He and Tom Arbuthnot cover what is actually in the free tier, the security and governance boundary versus consumer AI tools, the 2025 feature run of unified history, memory, GPT-5 and in-app chat, and the adoption support Microsoft funds.

Many thanks to Landis, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Tell users to look for the small green shield in the top right of the Copilot interface — that is the quickest way to confirm they are in the work-protected, Entra-signed-in Copilot Chat rather than the consumer Copilot. ▶ 4:10
• The free tier is best understood as chat, agents and IT control. It does not include the multi-turn Researcher/deep research experiences, and the new in-app chat in Word and Excel reasons only over the currently open document, not across Graph, OneDrive or SharePoint. ▶ 6:45
• Lesser-known capabilities already included at no cost: translation, image recognition, Pages for asset creation and sharing, and a dictation tool Bleasdale uses to talk through complex information and have Copilot structure it. ▶ 7:15
• A pulse survey at Microsoft's London AI Tour found 71% of users had used consumer AI tools at work — the practical argument for giving people a sanctioned tool rather than leaving them to judge case by case whether a document is safe to paste in. ▶ 8:17
• The governance case: tenant data is not used to train the large language models, web search queries are encrypted and de-identified, and all prompts, responses and web queries remain available for audit and eDiscovery and flow into retention policies and Purview. ▶ 10:20
• The 2025 delivery run to quote to sceptical stakeholders: May brought a 2x response time improvement and roughly 12% better prompt quality (measured on user feedback), July added unified global history across Copilot surfaces, late July added memory and personalisation on the free tier, GPT-5 shipped same-day in August, and September/October brought GA of Copilot Chat inside the Microsoft 365 apps. ▶ 13:56
• End users on the free tier can build their own web-grounded agents at no cost using the built-in Copilot Studio Lite (formerly Agent Builder); only tenant-grounded agents that touch internal data or run workflows need pay-as-you-go or pre-purchased token packs. ▶ 22:07
• Adoption support that is already funded: the Copilot Chat success kit and Great Copilot Activity email templates on adoption.microsoft.com, Bleasdale's 45–50 minute IT adoption masterclass at aka.ms/adoptingchat, plus FastTrack for deployment and security concerns and Unified/partner-funded change management for larger customers. ▶ 23:38
• Use Teams Admin Center usage data on Copilot Chat to identify who is using AI in anger, then make that the objective metric for prioritising paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licences. ▶ 26:12

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

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