Microsoft 365 Copilot: how to evaluate whether the cost is justified

Microsoft 365 Copilot represents a significant per-user investment. Whether it is justified depends on an analysis specific to your organisation.

Tasks where M365 Copilot delivers clear value

• Meeting summaries: if knowledge workers attend four or more meetings per week spending twenty minutes summarising each, Copilot recovers significant time
• Email management: summarising long threads, drafting responses, identifying action items
• Document drafting: first-draft generation for reports, proposals, presentations from notes

The data foundation prerequisite

M365 Copilot draws on Microsoft Graph. If your SharePoint content is a mess of outdated files, Copilot cannot do much with it. Before deploying at scale, assess your M365 data quality.

The ROI calculation

1. Identify two or three tasks where your target users spend the most time that Copilot assists
2. Estimate current time spent per week per user on each task
3. Estimate realistic time saving (not the best-case demo saving)
4. Calculate total hours saved per user per month
5. Multiply by effective hourly cost and compare to licence cost

Organisations getting clear value from M365 Copilot identified specific high-frequency use cases and measured actual time savings. The disappointed ones deployed broadly without a clear hypothesis.