Microsoft Copilot has been the most hyped productivity tool of 2025. AI that writes your emails, summarises your meetings, and creates presentations while you focus on "real work." Enterprise companies have been adopting it aggressively.
But what about smaller businesses? At roughly £18 per user per month, is Copilot worth the investment for a UK SME—or is it an expensive solution looking for a problem?
Here's an honest assessment based on what we've seen working with clients.
What Copilot Actually Does
Copilot integrates AI into the Microsoft 365 tools you already use. In practical terms:
In Outlook, it drafts email replies based on conversation context, summarises long email threads, and prioritises your inbox. "Write a polite reply declining this meeting" becomes a two-second task.
In Teams, it generates meeting summaries with action items, catches you up on channels you've missed, and answers questions about discussions you weren't part of.
In Word, it drafts documents from prompts, rewrites text in different tones, and summarises long documents.
In Excel, it creates formulas from natural language descriptions, generates charts, and identifies patterns in data.
In PowerPoint, it creates draft presentations from outlines or Word documents.
The AI is genuinely impressive. It understands context, maintains appropriate tone, and produces usable first drafts most of the time.
Where It Delivers Value
For certain roles and tasks, Copilot is genuinely transformative:
Executive assistants and administrators who spend hours managing calendars, drafting correspondence, and summarising information see the most immediate benefit. A task that took 20 minutes now takes 2.
People who write a lot—proposals, reports, client communications—find Copilot useful for overcoming blank page syndrome and producing first drafts quickly.
Anyone drowning in meetings benefits from automatic summaries and the ability to catch up on discussions they missed.
Sales teams use it to personalise outreach emails at scale, summarise customer interactions, and prepare for meetings quickly.
If your team spends significant time on these activities, the ROI calculation is straightforward. If Copilot saves each user an hour per week, that's four hours monthly. At average SME salary rates, that's easily worth more than £18.
Where It Falls Short
Copilot isn't magic, and understanding the limits matters:
It requires Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Enterprise as a baseline. If you're on Business Basic or Standard, you need to upgrade before you can even add Copilot. That changes the cost calculation significantly.
The quality varies. First drafts often need substantial editing. Meeting summaries miss nuance. Email suggestions are sometimes tone-deaf. You're not replacing human judgment—you're accelerating it.
It doesn't understand your business. Copilot knows what's in your documents and emails, but it doesn't know your clients, your industry, or your company culture. Outputs need checking against context it doesn't have.
Change management is real. Your team needs to learn new habits. If people don't actively use Copilot, they get no value. Adoption is work.
The Cost Calculation for UK SMEs
Let's be concrete. For a team of 10:
Copilot licenses: £180/month (£2,160/year)
If you need to upgrade from Business Standard to Business Premium to qualify: add roughly £50/user/month, or £500/month (£6,000/year) for the team.
Total potential cost: £8,160/year
To justify that investment, you need to save approximately 200 hours annually across the team—20 hours per person. That's about 25 minutes per person per week.
Achievable? Probably, if your team actually uses it. But "if" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Our Recommendation
Copilot makes sense for UK SMEs when:
- You're already on Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Enterprise
- Your team does significant email/document/meeting work
- You have someone who will champion adoption and train the team
- You're realistic about what AI can and can't do
It probably doesn't make sense when:
- You'd need to upgrade your Microsoft subscription just to qualify
- Your team's work is primarily hands-on, operational, or field-based
- You don't have bandwidth to manage the change
- You're hoping it will replace headcount (it won't)
An Alternative Approach
Not ready for full Copilot commitment? Microsoft 365 includes lighter AI features without the premium price tag. Many of the productivity gains come from learning to use AI effectively—you can start there.
Working with an AI automation agency or AI consultancy in London or across the UK can help you identify where AI genuinely helps your workflows before committing to enterprise-wide licensing. Start small, prove value, then scale.
The businesses getting most value from Copilot are those that started with free AI tools, identified where AI genuinely helps, and upgraded strategically. Not those who bought licenses hoping the technology would figure out where to add value.
AI assistants are real, and they're improving rapidly. But £18/user/month is real money for an SME. Make sure you're buying it for the right reasons.