Is Your Business Ready for Copilot? The Readiness Check Before You Buy a Licence

Our Microsoft 365 Copilot guide explains what Copilot does, what it costs and which licence you need. This page is the checklist: is your business ready? Five areas, each with a yes-or-no test you can run yourself. If you would rather we ran it for you, that is our Copilot readiness service.

Test: are your business files in SharePoint and OneDrive, and is email in Exchange Online?

Copilot reads Microsoft 365 and nothing else. Files on an office server, a NAS or personal Dropbox and Google Drive accounts are invisible to it, and it will answer confidently from what it can see, which is then incomplete. If the answer is "mostly", list what is elsewhere and decide whether to move it first. Our where should files live guide has the structure.

Also: is the data findable? Sensible site structure and file names matter, because Copilot references files by name and searches by content. "Final v3 (2).docx" is a Copilot problem.

Test: have you run the sharing reports and fixed what they found?

Copilot respects permissions, which means it surfaces everything a person already has permission to see, including the HR folder shared with "Everyone" in 2019. Before licensing:

• Run the data access governance reports (SharePoint Advanced Management, available once a Copilot licence exists, so assign one to an admin first).
• Remove "Everyone" and "Everyone except external users" from sites holding HR, finance or client data.
• Set the default sharing link to specific people.
• Apply restricted content discovery to any site you are not ready to open up.
• Label confidential documents with sensitivity labels.

If none of this has been done, you are not ready, whatever the licence budget says.

Test: can you name five to ten people and the task each would use it for weekly?

Copilot earns its keep for people who spend their day in email, documents and meetings: managers, sales, finance, bid writers, account managers. It is wasted on people who live in a line-of-business system. Write the list with the task beside each name ("summarise supplier threads", "first-draft proposals from our scope documents", "meeting recaps for the ops call"). If you cannot fill the list, start with Copilot Chat, which is free, and revisit.

Test: is there a training plan, a written rule set, and a champion?

Training by role, the slash-to-reference-files habit, checking output, and the rules for what may be pasted into which Copilot. A prompt library somewhere shared. Someone who will keep it alive after the first month. The main guide's training and rollout section sets out what good looks like; without it, licences go unused.

Test: have you agreed the measures before the pilot starts?

Five to ten people, four to six weeks, and measures agreed in advance: self-reported hours saved per week, active use from the admin centre reports, time from meeting to follow-up, and who asks to keep the licence. Compare against a break-even; in the main guide's worked example it is about 17 minutes saved per licensed user per week. Then license the people who use it, and reassign the licences that gather dust.

Our Copilot readiness service works through the five tests on your tenant: where data lives, the sharing reports and fixes, the use-case list with your managers, the training plan, and the pilot design with measures. You leave with a written answer to "are we ready?", the list of what to fix, and a pilot you can start. It is quoted as a fixed piece of work, with any licences shown separately at Microsoft's price on your quotation. For what Copilot does, what it costs and which licence you need, see the Microsoft 365 Copilot guide.