Microsoft Copilot has been available since early 2024 for Microsoft 365 Business Premium and E3/E5 subscribers. A year and a half later, we have enough hindsight to draw honest conclusions about what works, what doesn't — and most importantly, how to maximize ROI for a Quebec SMB.

High-ROI Use Cases

Among our clients who have deployed Copilot, these three uses consistently generate measurable value:

  • Automatic meeting summaries in Teams — Copilot generates a structured recap with decision points and action items. For an SMB where executives attend 6–8 meetings per week, the time savings are immediate and quantifiable.
  • Drafting contracts, proposals, and reports — Copilot in Word produces a base document from a short prompt. Sales teams at our clients report a 40% reduction in proposal writing time.
  • Data analysis in Excel — "Show me the sales trend by region over the last 6 months" in plain language. Especially useful for SMBs without a dedicated data analyst.

Disappointing Use Cases

  • Search in SharePoint / Teams — Copilot is supposed to "find everything you need in your company data." In practice, if your SharePoint is poorly structured (which is the case for most SMBs), Copilot returns unreliable results or hallucinates content.
  • Automated customer service — For SMBs that tried replacing their first-level customer support with Copilot, results are mixed. Quality depends entirely on the quality of the underlying knowledge base.

The Prerequisite Nobody Mentions: Data Governance

Copilot accesses everything the user has access to in Microsoft 365. If your SharePoint sharing policies are permissive (which we observe in 80% of unmanaged tenants), an accounting employee could ask Copilot for HR data they should not have access to — and get it.

Before any Copilot deployment, we systematically conduct a Microsoft 365 permissions audit to identify and remediate excessive access. It is a prerequisite, not an option.

The Real Cost of Copilot

Microsoft Copilot costs $30 USD per user per month (approximately $41 CAD). For a 30-user SMB, that is about $14,760 CAD per year. The question is not "is it expensive?" but "how many person-hours does it replace?" A single employee saving 30 minutes per day is enough to justify the license cost.