Guides6 min read
You bought Copilot. Now what?
Little changes after a Copilot rollout until teams are shown real tasks, sharing is tidied, and the systems that hold your figures are connected.
Mercury Labs
Little changes after a Copilot rollout until teams are shown real tasks, sharing is tidied, and the systems that hold your figures are connected.
If you have bought Copilot licences and little has changed, the cause is rarely the tool. Usually nobody was shown what to use it for, it cannot see the systems where your figures live, and nobody checked what it can see before it was switched on. Fix those three, in that order, before you buy anything else.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. It answers from the emails, chats, meetings and documents that the person asking already has permission to open.
Because a licence is not a change in how anyone works. People open the assistant, ask it something general, get a general answer, and go back to what they were doing. The companies that get value pick a small number of tasks that happen every week, such as preparing for a client meeting, summarising a long email thread or drafting the first version of a proposal, and show each team how to do those well.
The second reason is quieter. The questions people most want answered are about the business: which customers are late paying, how this quarter compares with last, what was agreed with a supplier. Much of that does not live in documents and email. It lives in the accounting system, the sales system and the tools that run operations, and Copilot does not see those unless someone connects them.
Whatever the person asking can already open. Microsoft's documentation says Copilot only surfaces organisational data to which the individual user has at least view permission, and that prompts, responses and the data it reads are not used to train the underlying models.
That rule is sound, and it has a consequence. Over the years most companies have shared folders more widely than they meant to: a salary spreadsheet in a site the whole company can open, a board pack shared with "everyone" because it was quicker. Nobody found those files because nobody went looking. An assistant that searches everything a person can open will find them the first time someone asks the right question.
Anything outside Microsoft 365 that has not been connected to it. For most companies that is the important part: invoices and payments, the sales pipeline, stock, bookings, projects and time. Ask Copilot how much a customer owes and, unless that figure happens to be in an email or a spreadsheet, it has nothing to go on. If it is in an old spreadsheet, the answer will be confident and out of date.
There are two ways to close the gap. Microsoft offers connectors and agents that bring outside systems into Copilot one at a time. Or you put one governed layer between your systems and every assistant your people use, so the same figures and the same access rules apply whichever assistant is asked. The second is what the Company Twin does: it joins your records so that Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT answer from the same live figures.
| Option | When to use | Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|
| Show each team three tasks | People have licences and are not sure what to ask | Costs a few hours per team. It is the cheapest change and usually the largest |
| Tidy what is shared | Before more people get a licence, and before anyone asks about pay or the board | Dull work for whoever runs Microsoft 365. It reduces risk whether or not you use Copilot |
| Write a one-page data policy | Staff are also using other assistants, or are unsure what may be pasted in | An afternoon to write. It needs an owner and a review date to stay true |
| Connect your other systems | The questions people ask are about customers, money or operations | Real work, and it needs access rules agreed first. It is where most of the value is |
05 stages
Ask each team which three weekly tasks take the most reading and writing.
Watchpoint
A company-wide training session about prompts is forgotten within a week.
Check who can open your HR, finance and board sites, and narrow it.
Watchpoint
Sharing with everyone is the usual cause of an embarrassing answer.
Write down which information may go into which AI tools.
Watchpoint
Without a rule, careful people use nothing and careless people use everything.
Name one person who owns the rollout and answers questions.
Watchpoint
A rollout owned by IT alone is treated as an IT project.
After a month, ask each team what they now do differently.
Watchpoint
The count of people who opened Copilot tells you nothing about that.
Ask about tasks, not usage. The admin reports show how many people opened the assistant, and that number goes up when you remind people and down when you stop. What you want to know is whether meeting preparation takes twenty minutes where it took an hour, or whether proposals go out a day sooner. Ask each team lead for two examples a month. If a team has none after a quarter, move their licences to a team that does.
When the question is about a system it cannot see, and when the job is to do something rather than draft something. Copilot is good at reading and writing inside Microsoft 365. It is not, on its own, a way to reconcile accounts, chase late invoices or keep a pipeline up to date. Those need the systems of record connected, and rules about who may see and change what.
Keep the licences. Spend the first fortnight on three tasks per team and on tidying what is shared, and write the one-page data policy while you are at it. Then list the ten questions your managers most often ask about the business, and mark which of them Copilot can answer today. The ones it cannot answer tell you which systems to connect first. That list, and the work of connecting them, is where our AI transformation programme starts.