Most organizational laptops have Consumer Copilot and one of the two M365 Copilot variants deployed on them. And most employees can’t tell the three apart.
That’s a problem. If an employee has to think about which Copilot they should use, you’ve already lost them.
Here’s the breakdown.
The first is Copilot, the consumer version. It’s free, available at copilot.microsoft.com or built into Windows and Edge. A capable AI assistant with zero access to your organization’s data. No emails. No files. No meeting history. Useful for general tasks and completely disconnected from your Microsoft 365 environment. Employees using this version for work are essentially using a consumer tool that knows nothing about their job.
The second is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Included in most commercial M365 subscriptions. Lives in Teams. Can answer some questions using organizational data, but not much. Very rudimentary. It won’t write inside Word, Excel, or PowerPoint for you. It won’t summarize your meetings. It won’t help you build a deck from a brief.
It gives employees just enough to think they’re using paid Copilot when they’re not. That’s the trap.
The third is Microsoft 365 Copilot, the licensed version at $30 per user per month. This one lives inside your apps. Word. Excel. PowerPoint. Outlook. Teams meetings. Grounded in your organization’s data, working where your employees already spend their time.
This is the version that changes business workflows. The other two don’t.
Here’s why this matters. I keep hearing from leaders who believe they’ve deployed Copilot because they see it in their Teams sidebar or in Outlook. When I ask which version, most aren’t sure.
The gap between version two and version three isn’t a feature gap. It’s an ROI gap.
So when someone in your org says “we have Copilot,” it’s worth asking: which one do they mean?