If you had asked me in 2024 whether Copilot was a good AI tool, I would have hesitated. Microsoft was a tech company trying to take on AI, unlike OpenAI or Anthropic who were built from the ground up around it. It felt like a bolt-on. Something big and corporate that would look impressive in a press release but not really change the way anyone worked day to day.
Fast forward to now, and I have completely changed my mind. Copilot is throwing real punches. The functionality it brings to the Microsoft 365 suite, the tools that most office workers already sit inside all day, is genuinely impressive. Summarising meetings in Teams. Drafting emails in Outlook. Pulling data together in Excel. Generating first drafts of reports in Word. These are not gimmicks. These are time savers that add up across a team of ten, fifty, five hundred people.
The most underused tool in British business
Here is the problem though. Over 300,000 businesses in the UK now have Copilot licences rolled out, and almost none of them have given their people any training on how to actually use it.
That means hundreds of thousands of employees are sitting next to one of the most powerful productivity tools ever built, and they either do not know it is there, do not know what it does, or tried it once and gave up because they did not get a useful result.
It is like buying every person in your organisation a power drill and then watching them use it as a paperweight.
Why it is not intuitive
The thing about Copilot is that it is not like picking up a new app. It sits inside tools people already use, which sounds like it should make it easier. But in practice it makes it harder, because people do not know what has changed. They open Outlook and it looks the same. They open Word and it looks the same. They do not realise there is a completely new way to work available to them, right there in the toolbar.
And even when they do find it, the quality of what Copilot produces depends entirely on how you ask. A vague prompt gives you a vague answer. A well-structured prompt gives you something genuinely useful. That is a skill. And skills need teaching.
What proper training looks like
At The AI Training Co, our Copilot masterclass is designed for non-technical teams. Not developers. Not IT managers. The people who actually use Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel every single day as part of their job.
We run sessions from 90 minutes to a full half day, live and facilitated, either online or in person. Delegates leave knowing exactly how to use Copilot in their role, with real examples and real prompts they can use straight away.
We do not talk about large language models. We do not get into the architecture of AI. We show people how to save time on the work they already do, safely and confidently.
The cost of not training
If your organisation is paying for Copilot licences and not training your people to use them, you are paying for a tool and leaving the value on the table. Every month that goes by without training is a month of wasted potential.
The good news is that it does not take long to fix. A 90-minute workshop can completely change how a team uses their existing tools. And once people see what is possible, they do not go back.