Microsoft 365 Copilot Setup for Small Businesses

Copilot Chat or Microsoft 365 Copilot: what you are actually buying

Microsoft uses the Copilot name for several things, which causes most of the confusion we see. There are two you need to know about as a business:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is included with Business Basic, Standard and Premium. It is an AI chat grounded in web results, with writing help and data analysis on files you upload. It does not read your mailbox, Teams chats or SharePoint on its own.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot (sold to businesses under 300 users as Copilot Business) is the paid add-on. It works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, and it can search across the email, chats, meetings and files you have permission to see. Microsoft calls this grounding in your work data.

At the time of writing (October 2026), Microsoft's UK pricing page lists the Copilot Business add-on at £16.10 per user a month, paid yearly, excluding VAT, with an offer price of £13.80 for the first year on orders between 1 July and 31 December 2026. Microsoft also sells bundles: Business Standard with Copilot at £18.10 and Business Premium with Copilot at £24.60 per user a month, ex VAT. Prices change, so we check the live page with you before anything is bought.

You do not need to license everyone. We usually suggest a pilot of a few people who write a lot of documents, run a lot of meetings or live in email, then decide from real use.

Fix permissions before you switch it on

Copilot respects existing permissions. It will not show anyone a file they cannot already open. The problem is that in most small businesses, people can open far more than anyone realises: a SharePoint site shared with "Everyone except external users" in 2019, a OneDrive folder shared by link to the whole company, an HR library that inherited the wrong permissions.

Before Copilot, nobody stumbled on those files. With Copilot, a question like "what are we paying the new sales manager?" can find them in seconds. So the first part of every setup is a permissions review:

• Run SharePoint sharing and site permission reports and find content shared with large groups or by anyone-links.
• Tighten the default sharing link type in the SharePoint admin centre from "Anyone" or "People in your organisation" to "Specific people" where appropriate.
• Lock down HR, finance and director folders into their own sites with named owners.
• On Business Premium, apply Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels so confidential files are marked and encrypted.
• Check guest accounts in Microsoft Entra ID and remove ones nobody recognises.

This work is useful even if you never buy Copilot. It is the same tidy-up we recommend in our SharePoint and OneDrive support.

Getting Copilot to appear and work

When Copilot is licensed but missing, the cause is nearly always one of a handful of things we check first:

• The user is signed in to Office with a personal Microsoft account instead of their work account.
• Microsoft 365 Apps are on an old build or the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel. Copilot features roll out to Current Channel and Monthly Enterprise Channel first.
• Files are saved locally or on an old file server. Copilot works best with files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.
• Outlook is the classic version with an old build, or the mailbox is not in Exchange Online.
• The licence was assigned minutes ago. Allow time for it to apply, then sign out and back in.

We also set up the Copilot settings that matter in the Microsoft 365 admin centre: who can use web search grounding, which pre-built agents are available, and whether staff can build their own agents with Agent Builder.

Training people to use it well

Licences that nobody uses are the most common Copilot waste we see. A short session per team, using their own real work, makes the difference. We show people how to:

• Summarise a long email thread and draft a reply in Outlook.
• Get a recap, decisions and actions from a recorded Teams meeting.
• Draft a document in Word from existing files, referenced with a forward slash.
• Ask Excel questions about a table without writing formulas.
• Check facts. Copilot can be wrong, and staff should treat it as a first draft.

Pair this with a written AI acceptable use policy so people know what they can and cannot put into AI tools.

Cost and how we work

Our setup work is billed at £45 an hour + VAT, with a 30-minute minimum and then 15-minute blocks. A small business that already has tidy SharePoint permissions might need a couple of hours for licensing, settings and a short training session. A business with years of messy sharing will need longer, and we will tell you the likely time after an initial look.

You buy the licences yourself from Microsoft, or we can advise on where to buy. We do not add a mark-up to Microsoft licences. If you are on our Complete plan at £99 a month + VAT, Copilot questions from staff fall under the included Microsoft 365 helpdesk. Not sure which plan you need first? See Microsoft 365 licensing advice.

What it costs

Support plans from £25 a month + VAT, or £45 an hour + VAT for one-off fixes. Pick a plan if you want it looked after every month, or pay by the hour for a one-off job.

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