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Unlocking smarter work: how to boost your personal productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot turns AI from an abstract idea into a practical business tool, seamlessly embedded in familiar apps like Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to boost productivity, decision-making, and adoption.
For many executives, AI still feels like an abstract concept, something that’s everywhere in the news, but hard to pin down in terms of real business impact. That changes with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Copilot makes AI tangible. It’s no longer a futuristic idea or a distant promise. It’s right there in your Microsoft 365 apps, such as, Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. With Copilot, AI has become something personal: a tool that works with you and for you, in the applications you already use every day. Whether it’s drafting an email, summarizing a meeting, building a presentation, or analyzing data, Copilot turns vague potential into immediate, concrete value.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot (and what is it not)?
One source of confusion is the difference between Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Copilot Chat comes bundled with any Microsoft license (E3, E5, or Business Premium). It provides AI-powered answers based on public web data. Think of it as a corporate-safe alternative to ChatGPT.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot, by contrast, is a paid add-on. It integrates Copilot directly into the Microsoft 365 apps your teams use daily. More importantly, it works with and can draw insights from your organization’s internal data, always respecting security rules and user access rights.
An important differentiator is security and data confidentiality. Nothing you enter into Copilot leaves your company’s tenant. Unlike public AI models, your organizational data is never used to train external systems. For C-level leaders, this aspect forms the very foundation of trust.
Boosting productivity and decision-making
Executives often ask: what’s the business case for Copilot? The value can be summarized in three areas:
- Efficiency: Copilot significantly reduces time spent on repetitive tasks. It summarizes emails, drafts documents, builds slide decks, or generates formulas in Excel.
- Quality: It helps you produce higher-quality outputs, whether that’s better-structured reports, more engaging presentations, or sharper insights from data.
- Adoption: Because Copilot lives inside familiar apps, the barrier to entry is extremely low.
But beyond productivity, it’s important to note that Copilot also accelerates and improves decision making. By analyzing data, distilling insights, and offering clear suggestions, it helps leaders break through decision paralysis and choose with confidence.
Use cases across the Microsoft 365 suite
Outlook
- Draft and refine email responses in seconds.
- Use Schedule with Copilot to turn messy email threads into fully prepared meetings, with attendees, agendas, and proposed timeslots.
- Summarize long email chains so you only read what matters.
- Prioritize your inbox and get quick “vacation catch-up” summaries, so you know which emails to handle first.
“One of the features I use most is Schedule with Copilot,” says Joni Sabbe, Microsoft 365 Business Applications expert at 9altitudes. “When an complex email thread becomes too complexcalls for a meeting, Copilot simply proposes a meeting, sets the agenda, and finds the best slot for everyone involved. It saves me an incredible amount of time.”
Teams
- Automatically generate meeting notes and action items.
- Search across chats and meetings with natural language (“What did we decide about the Q2 budget last week?”).
- Ask Copilot to highlight key decisions made during a meeting.
Newer features in Teams also support users during meetings in real time. Copilot can read the tone of discussions, flag when people are not aligned and show whether the team is on the same page or not. This gives you quick insight into group dynamics.
Word
- Summarize long documents at the top of the page.
- Draft content from scratch using a simple prompt.
- Rewrite and refine, change tone or style, while respecting your company’s data privacy.
- Generate overviews of tracked changes and comments.
- Suggest standard language or clauses aligned with best practices, for example for legal documents.
PowerPoint
- Instantly generate presentations from Word documents.
- Apply corporate templates and branding automatically.
- Update slides with new content in just a few clicks.
Excel
- Generate formulas with natural language (“Compare this year’s sales to last year’s by region.”)
- Create pivot tables and charts automatically.
- Highlight key insights from datasets.
Activate Copilot in your organization
Ready to unlock the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot in your organization?
From quick wins to strategic adoption
According to Joni Sabbe, Copilot is typically adopted seamlessly, with few issues along the way. Employees pick it up quickly because it’s embedded in tools they already know. But inspiration alone isn’t enough. After an initial session, users may experiment for a few days and then revert to old habits.
That’s why 9altitudes doesn’t just provide one-off training. Our approach spans three layers:
- Inspiration sessions to show what’s possible
- Hands-on training once licenses are activated, ensuring people know how to maximize value
- Adoption trajectories for larger organizations, including phased rollouts, internal champions, and ongoing measurement of business impact
“We’ve seen that a single training sparks curiosity, but real adoption comes with multiple touchpoints. You need to revisit how people are using Copilot, share new best practices, and support them in embedding AI into their daily routines,” explains Joni Sabbe.
For more advanced use cases, 9altitudes also leverages Copilot Studio to build custom agents. One example is a Marketing Agent trained on 9altitudes’ own product data and tone of voice, ensuring all generated content aligns with branding.
Looking ahead
Microsoft shows no signs of slowing down. Features like document activity tracking in Word and continuous model upgrades prove that Copilot is evolving month by month. At the time of writing, Copilot already runs on GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 models, making responses even more accurate and contextually aware. This shows Microsoft’s ongoing investment in ensuring Copilot remains at the cutting edge of AI performance.
For 9altitudes, the vision is clear: Copilot in Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel is not just a productivity booster. It’s a low-threshold gateway into broader AI adoption, including Dynamics 365 and industry-specific business applications.
Ready to get started with Copilot? 9altitudes offers tailored inspiration sessions, training, and adoption programs to ensure your teams not only begin with Copilot, but use it to transform how they work.
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