Umm no, it's the opposite. It's super high-risk right now for us. Microsoft is constantly shifting stuff around leading us to have to constantly change our processes, documentation etc. Often with zero heads-up and often defaults to on. Some incidents:

- They suddenly started a "free promotion" with Sharepoint agents. We don't want to offer that to our users but it just popped in one day and the admin setting defaulted to on so people were already using it before we turned it off. This was a big deal for us.

- Constant rebranding of their product names leading to confusion among users and zero-value documentation and process rewrites for us. Also constantly fiddling with the URLs is sooo annoying.

- Constant changes in features leading to impact to our DPIA. For example copilot chat didn't have history at first. So no data was kept (they also promise they don't store any for training). Suddenly they added that one day, so we had to redo our entire DPIA because it now does suddenly store personal info which it didn't before so a whole lot of overhead comes into scope (data lifecycle, privacy regulations, security, data loss prevention etc). This is exhausting and there is no way to delay these features until we have approved them. Also, it caused our DPIA team to be highly critical after this incident. Because of course: If they did this before, what guarantees that they won't change something worse next month?

- Limited granularity of access controls - a lot is very high-scope on/off style controls. Meaning that if we want to block something we often block unintended features as well.

A lot of these things are definitely 'big jumps' and 'surprises'.

Plus for 10$ a month (~8.50 EUR last month) I get more-than-enough-for-me access to Gemini, Claude and OpenAI models from my code editor. I wouldn't pay double for Claude Code or Cursor, so I feel like it's a good enough deal.

Copilot doesn't run on Microsoft's own LLMs, they're all third party. ChatGPT in office copilot, in github you can choose various other ones too.

Microsoft is really just a reseller there.

Personally I think Claude Code (with Opus in particular) is far better. Unfortunately they are very aware of this and thus it is eyewateringly expensive.

If only asking from Copilot in a chat, the results are less spectacular or reliable. That just shows how a chat UI isn't the best solution for everything. Yet taking the M365 Search terms as input for the LLM to translate into a query that doesn't require the user to know the exact keyword to search - yes, that's a clear step forward.

And Graph grounding remains one of the features behind the premium license. So, only ~2% of M365 users will currently see this benefit. Unless the pay-as-you-go pricing option has huge adoption that we don't have any leaked figures on yet.

Possibly the Office Agent can become a V2 of what M365 Copilot was originally sold as. It's not at all surprising that it takes a few years to figure out what LLMs can really be used for in Office tools. Whereas asking for businesses to fund all these experiments with a $30pupm license is not the best move to create early adoption and fans...

I also use it to play around with data and roughly graph it to understand trends without having to roll out a Jupyter notebook.

I find it quite useful.

What I like:

- Meeting catch-up (I don't use meeting minutes much)

- Finding stuff in my messy uncategorised mailbox

- Finding stuff in sharepoint

Things that were a heavy disappointment:

- Everything in excel

- Rewriting text (it's always too noticeable that it's AI, it should be able to learn and match my style)

- Powerpoint presentation generation. It could not modify for a long time and even now it's just not useful

Tbh I only use it a few times per month where it's actually useful. For other things I've tried but it needs so much explaining to get it to do exactly what I want that it's more efficient to just do it myself.

If you see a work and web tab at the top, click work. Then it should be able to. If you don't see this, your company is not paying and it just won't work.

Are there any companies solving LLM-based interactions with arbitrary messy spreadsheets?

Not the nice demo ones with a single consistent table and maybe some charts/PivotTables - the ones with 20 sheets each of which has 3-4 different data tables laid out side by side, which should be linked to each other but likely aren't?

I've long thought that one could build a probabilistic graph representation, annotated with text, of "this is the likely meaning of this area in the sheet, this is how it relates to other columns in other areas, formulas are inconsistent in this way," allow an LLM to ask questions of a tool that can traverse this graph until it determines an optimal plan, and allow it to output and iterate on e.g. xlwings code to execute that plan.

I'm frankly surprised Microsoft didn't create an entire "skunkworks" for this problem - is anyone else doing so?

Microsoft is actively killing of Active Directory and they're replacing it with Entra ID, which is "just" OAuth and hence is relatively easily replaced by a competing product.

Of course all the people asking for these were already very interested in AI so they are not a very representative group. We did take that into account.

on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.

I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.

If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.

Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace

It's kind of amazing.

We make heavy utilization of Copilot Studio lite and full. Lite has quick access to SharePoint/Teams data. Full has access to _any_ data that has a Power Platform connector, REST API, MCP server, or Copilot [Graph] connector, all of which you can build or buy yourself. SAP, SQL, Databricks, you name it, Copilot Studio full can consume it.

It sounds like you don't have an M365 Copilot license but are instead using Copilot 365 Chat (the naming is horrid, absolutely).

I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.

Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.

The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.

That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?

That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.

If you have a tab selector "Work / Web" at the top, you do have the paid version. Select Work to make it able to find stuff in sharepoint, look at your calendar and emails etc.

If you don't have this selector you only have the free version.

> If the normal search system has access to the data why doesn’t copilot? Surely it would be trivial for Microsoft to run copilot in a way that keeps company data private so that they could actually turn it on and make it useful by default.

Upselling of course. Finding stuff in the gigantic trash heap that is Sharepoint is its main added value for me.

Also, RAG will cost a lot more compute.

The list goes on and on, and we have to take time into consideration: people may have default strong feelings against the tech in question now, but often that's just a default stance. Over time, people will dip their toes in, and make use of it to whatever degree makes sense for them. Don't mistake current vocal criticism for the end all, be all, stance that will last forever: people get used to stuff, use it a bit, or more than a bit, time passes, and the tech slowly melds itself into people's lives in some manner and in some form: MS will wait and observer, and evolve the product to suit that slow change over time.

I personally thinks this just pisses people off. It certainly does me. I don't want to be told what to do, especially by some vendor. If I don't want to use it I don't want to be herded into using it. If they try anyway I will just push back and start hating on it just out of annoyance.

However this has always been Microsoft's adoption model. Very pushy. Unlike for example Apple's where they make things look, feel and work really good so people actually want to use it.

If only MS could have asked Copilot whether their naming strategy makes sense.

Hmm no, but they are clearly under pressure. Integrating Copilot Chat in office was a pretty big move, and the constant rebranding of everything also feels like they have zero vision and are losing control and scrambling to fix it.

I wonder if Copilot Chat in office will really convince users though. As it doesn't have access to Graph it will lose some of the most valuable 'intelligence'. And thus users will try it, get convinced it's pretty useless and be more hesitant to pay for a license in the future.

They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.

Who else can offer that?

For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.

And yeah Teams, I can't stand it. Outlook too, in particular the "new" one that doesn't do half the things the old one could do and requires all your email to be in MS cloud even if you have another provider.

That's probably because you're not using it as a modifier so the OP's complaint of the automatic key-up event doesn't impact you (it's not necessary to have a keep-pressed state in this type of use).