Microsoft Copilot for Salespeople
One name now covers three different products, and that is the most common source of confusion when people talk about Copilot. We keep them apart throughout this page and spell out what each one gives a B2B salesperson. Every fact comes from Microsoft’s documentation.
As of August 12, 2026
In 30 seconds
Seven sentences on what your company most likely already has in its Microsoft 365 license and what only a paid add-on brings.
- If your company has a Microsoft 365 subscription, your salespeople most likely already have a work AI chat at no extra cost. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is available at no additional cost to Microsoft Entra account users with an eligible subscription.
- That no-cost chat is grounded only in web data. Company data gets into a conversation in four ways that Microsoft lists: pasting it or uploading a file, open content, Copilot Chat in Outlook, and an agent with access to organizational content.
- Your inbox and calendar are the exception. Copilot Chat in Outlook understands email, calendar, meetings, chats and a limited set of files, even without a paid license.
- Since April 15, 2026, unlicensed users have had restricted access to Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The largest customers lost it completely, and smaller organizations dropped to standard access, with quality that varies over the day. Outlook kept Copilot regardless of license.
- A paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license unlocks the rest: Copilot in the Office apps, voice features and building your own agents.
- You build your own agent at a computer. Agent Builder has no mobile version, and on your phone you use agents that are already built.
- Microsoft’s official list of languages supported by Microsoft 365 Copilot has 50 entries, and the same document doesn’t say which features differ by language.
Plans: individual and business tiers
Copilot looks different from a personal account and from a work account, and the work tier splits again into a no-cost chat and a paid add-on license. Mixing up these levels leads to bad purchasing decisions and to customer data leaving your company’s protection. We don’t quote prices, because promotions and price lists change faster than this page.
Individual plan
Personal Microsoft account: the Microsoft Copilot app
The Microsoft Copilot app and copilot.microsoft.com, bing.com/chat, bing.com/copilotsearch, copilot.com and copilot.ai are the entry points for a personal Microsoft account. Microsoft split the names in January 2025, and since then consumer Copilot has been a separate product.
The documentation says plainly that the Microsoft Copilot app doesn’t work for commercial users who sign in with a Microsoft Entra account, and it advises admins to remap the Copilot key to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
A personal account isn’t covered by enterprise data protection, so a salesperson keeps customer materials and CRM data out of this tier.
| What you get | Personal Microsoft account | Microsoft Entra work account |
|---|---|---|
| Entry points | Microsoft Copilot app, copilot.microsoft.com, bing.com/chat, bing.com/copilotsearch, copilot.com, copilot.ai | Microsoft 365 Copilot app, copilot.cloud.microsoft, Copilot Chat in Edge, Outlook and Teams |
| Sign-in with a Microsoft Entra account | - | yes |
| Enterprise data protection | - | yes, in Copilot Chat at no extra cost |
| Admin controls and tenant policies | - | yes, through Cloud Policy and the Copilot Control System |
A dash means Microsoft’s documentation doesn’t list that item for the column. The addresses in the left column don’t support Microsoft Entra accounts, so a salesperson signed in with a work account can’t use them.
Copilot entry points and management in Microsoft’s documentation
Business plan
Work account: Copilot Chat at no extra cost and the Microsoft 365 Copilot license
Copilot Chat is available at no additional cost to every Microsoft Entra account user with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. The list includes Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium, Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, F1 and F3, and Office 365 E1, E3, E5 and F3, along with the no-Teams versions sold in the European Economic Area.
For work, the entry point is the Microsoft 365 Copilot app or copilot.cloud.microsoft. At no extra cost you get web-grounded chat, a side pane that is aware of open content in selected Microsoft 365 apps, file uploads, image generation, Copilot Pages, IT controls and enterprise data protection.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot license is an add-on to a qualifying subscription, and you can’t buy it on its own. To see what a given salesperson has, check the label in the apps: “M365 Copilot (Premium)” means the full experience with the add-on license, “M365 Copilot (Basic)” means standard access without the license, and “Copilot chat (Basic)” means no access to Copilot chat in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
| What you get | Copilot Chat (no extra cost) | Microsoft 365 Copilot (add-on license) |
|---|---|---|
| Access requirement | Microsoft Entra account with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription | qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription plus the purchased add-on |
| Web-grounded chat, Copilot Pages, file uploads | yes | yes |
| Enterprise data protection | yes, at no extra cost | yes |
| Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote | since April 15, 2026: removed for the largest customers, standard access for smaller ones | yes, the full experience |
| Copilot in Outlook grounded in your inbox and calendar | yes | yes |
| Semantic index and full access to work data through Work IQ | grounding through lexical indexing | yes |
| Voice features | not available today; Microsoft says they are coming | yes, as part of priority access |
| Agent Builder and Copilot Studio | an agent grounded only in web knowledge at no cost; otherwise Copilot Credits or pay-as-you-go billing | included in the license |
| Label shown in the apps | “M365 Copilot (Basic)” or “Copilot chat (Basic)” | “M365 Copilot (Premium)” |
A dash means Microsoft’s documentation doesn’t list that item for the tier.
Monthly billing for the add-on also requires an annual commitment, so “let’s try it for a month” won’t work here. Companies with up to 300 users have a separate purchase path: the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business add-on and the Business Standard and Business Premium plans sold with Copilot, including no-Teams versions. The small-business promotion on the add-on applies only for the first year and is available until September 30, 2026.
Standard access depends on available service capacity, so without a license, quality and response times can vary over the day. The same split applies to the inbox. Copilot Chat in Outlook uses lexical indexing, while the semantic index and full access to work data through Work IQ are reserved for the Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
Five use cases in sales
In Copilot, the license tier decides what a salesperson sees in their apps, so each use case below names its tier and a hard requirement.
Business plan
Inbox and calendar as your customer knowledge base
- What you do
- You ask about the history with a contact before you walk into the meeting. Copilot Chat in Outlook reaches into email, calendar, meetings, chats and files: the ones in the salesperson’s OneDrive, files from frequently visited SharePoint sites, files shared directly, and files they viewed, edited or created.
- Where you click
- Copilot Chat in Outlook, signed in with a work account.
- Which plan
- Copilot Chat at no extra cost, with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription.
- Hard requirement
- Without the add-on license, grounding works through lexical indexing, so ask using the names and phrases that actually appear in the correspondence.
This is the only place that survived the April 15, 2026 change. Outlook kept Copilot for unlicensed users, while Word, Excel and PowerPoint lost it.
Business plan
Email coaching and prep for sales conversations
- What you do
- Copilot rates a message’s clarity, sentiment and tone, summarizes the thread and writes a draft that pulls in content from other emails and Microsoft 365 materials you have access to. Since August 11, 2026, coaching works in chat while you write. You pick which suggestions to apply, and Copilot replaces the text in place.
- Where you click
- Copilot in Outlook on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and the web.
- Which plan
- Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
- Hard requirement
- Meeting prep in classic Outlook for Windows is available only to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
For a salesperson, this covers follow-ups and first contact. The draft is written with the context of all the correspondence already sitting in your inbox.
Business plan
Notes and decisions from sales meetings
- What you do
- Copilot in Teams meetings uses the real-time transcript, answers questions about how the conversation went and keeps working after the meeting ends. Copilot in calls captures key points, task owners and next steps, for both VoIP and PSTN.
- Where you click
- The Copilot pane in a Teams meeting or call.
- Which plan
- Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
- Hard requirement
- Meeting transcription has to be on. In Teams chat the scope is narrower: a summary covers up to 30 days of a single thread before the latest message, without reaching into other chats, transcripts, emails or files, and your conversation with Copilot disappears when you close the side pane.
Business plan
Your own agent built on your sales team’s knowledge
- What you do
- You build an assistant without code. You write instructions, point it to knowledge sources in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 connectors, test it before rollout and share it with the team. This is the place for your proposal standards, product descriptions and the rules your company follows when writing to customers.
- Where you click
- Agent Builder in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, at microsoft365.com/chat or office.com/chat, or in the Teams desktop and web client.
- Which plan
- Included in the Microsoft 365 Copilot license. A version grounded only in web knowledge is free, and without a license you’re left with Copilot Credits or pay-as-you-go billing.
- Hard requirement
- No mobile version, the *.api.powerplatform.com endpoint has to be unblocked on the firewall and proxy, and an admin can turn Agent Builder off.
Two facts answer the usual objections from IT. The agent respects existing permissions (if a user can’t access a SharePoint site, Teams channel or mailbox, the agent won’t surface content from those sources), and agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot don’t consume the tenant’s Dataverse storage.
Business plan
A shared prompt standard for the whole team
- What you do
- Instead of explaining for the hundredth time how to ask for customer research or proposal input, you build a prompt collection for your company’s needs and publish it to the whole tenant. On top of that, scheduled prompts for agents have been available since July 1, 2026.
- Where you click
- Copilot Prompt Gallery, on Windows and the web.
- Which plan
- Copilot Prompt Gallery works within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem; the documentation doesn’t tie publishing collections to a specific plan.
- Hard requirement
- An admin publishes a collection to the whole tenant, so this is a project for IT together with the head of sales. A salesperson can’t roll it out alone, and which prompts in the collection actually work depends on each person’s license.
A custom assistant for the team
Microsoft separates an agent for yourself from an agent for the organization. That difference decides who builds it and who maintains it afterward.
Agent Builder: an agent without code
You build the agent from microsoft365.com/chat, office.com/chat or the Teams desktop and web client. You define instructions, point to knowledge sources, test before rollout, use the agent in your Copilot conversations and share it with others in the organization. Agent Builder is available in Work and Web mode on the Microsoft 365 Copilot app bar.
Agent Builder’s official list of known limitations has four items. Read them before you start.
- Automatic permissions for SharePoint files and folders work only when you share with specific security groups. In every other case, permissions have to be fixed manually.
- Customer Managed Keys aren’t supported for agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot can’t be used in Teams Chat.
- If an admin turns off the web search policy, Copilot blocks web content as a knowledge source, even when the toggle in the knowledge pane looks active.
When Agent Builder is enough and when you need Copilot Studio
Agent Builder is enough for an agent for yourself or a small team, built in natural language on content you already have. Copilot Studio comes in for an agent serving a whole department, the organization or external customers, and for multi-step workflows, integrations with business systems and telemetry.
An agent built in Microsoft 365 Copilot can be copied to Copilot Studio with its configuration and instructions intact. Beyond the four official limitations, three conditions from outside that list apply: no mobile version, the *.api.powerplatform.com endpoint required on the firewall and proxy, and actions that integrate external services, which already require Copilot Studio.
Control on the admin side
The agent inventory and the options to enable, disable and block agents are in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot > Agents, and sharing controls are under Copilot > Settings > Data access > Agents. Only the admin can block and unpin agents.
You build a custom assistant at a computer. None of the four tools lets you build one from a phone.
On the road: phone and voice mode
This section covers what works in Copilot between meetings, in the car and in parking lots, and what isn’t there at all.
Works on your phone
- The Microsoft 365 Copilot app on iOS and Android, signed in with a work or school account.
- Chat, search, Library, content creation, Agents and Notebooks; what you get depends on your license.
- Hands-free voice conversations.
- Using agents you built earlier at a computer.
Doesn’t work on your phone
- Agent Builder: it isn’t available in mobile versions of the apps or sites.
- Voice features without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
- Voice mode through CarPlay.
- Vision features in voice mode for commercial customers.
- Voice chats with agents: announced and still unavailable.
The mobile app: what the license changes
Microsoft spells out the split. With a Microsoft 365 subscription, Copilot generates content from the latest information on the web. With a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, it tailors responses to your work data and the content you have access to.
Voice mode: what it covers
Voice features include dictation, reading responses aloud, voice chat (a two-way conversation) and activation with the “Hey Copilot” wake word. Voice chat works on the web and in the Microsoft 365 app on mobile and desktop.
Voice features aren’t currently available to users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. A second Microsoft source puts it as availability only to users with priority access.
Audio retention
By default, conversation audio isn’t stored at all. Only when feedback is turned on is the audio stored temporarily, and it’s deleted after 48 hours. Text transcripts are kept like regular conversations, and dictation stores neither the audio nor the transcribed text.
Your own agent doesn’t work by voice. Voice mode doesn’t accept @mentions of agents, and voice chats with agents have only been announced. Voice mode also has a single available voice and doesn’t create images or files.
For a long note after a meeting, dictation is the safer choice. You can fix the text before sending it, and Microsoft states that dictation stores neither the audio nor the transcribed text.
Company data and admin decisions
This section is for the person who has to make the case to IT, and for the IT team that signs off on it.
What Microsoft states
Prompts and responses aren’t used to train the underlying foundation models. Copilot Chat prompts and responses are processed within the Microsoft 365 service boundary, and the controls and commitments of Microsoft 365 Copilot extend to Copilot Chat.
- Enterprise data protection is included in Copilot Chat at no extra cost. You can see it in the interface as a green shield at the top, next to the new chat button.
- Microsoft acts as a data processor here, and its commitments come from the Data Protection Addendum and the Product Terms. Copilot Chat supports GDPR compliance.
- Prompts and responses are logged and stored in Exchange for audit and eDiscovery in the customer’s tenant, under Purview retention and audit policies. A salesperson’s conversation with Copilot is company material.
- Files uploaded to Copilot Chat go to the user’s OneDrive for Business under enterprise data protection, and Copilot Chat doesn’t keep the session document after the session ends.
- Citations for generated web queries stay visible in the thread for 24 hours.
- Since July 1, 2026, files generated by Copilot inherit the highest sensitivity label from their sources.
- Microsoft has added OpenAI and Anthropic as subprocessors in Microsoft Online Services.
Where the EU boundary runs
EU traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary, while worldwide traffic can be sent to the EU and other countries for model processing. The documentation adds a caveat: calls go to the nearest data centers in the region, but when utilization is especially high they can go to regions with more available capacity.
Web search queries to Bing follow different rules and aren’t EU Data Boundary compliant. Bing operates separately from Microsoft 365, under an agreement between the user and Microsoft in which Microsoft is an independent data controller. Bing doesn’t receive user or tenant identifiers, the full prompt (unless it’s very short), entire files uploaded to Copilot Chat, or entire pages and PDFs summarized in Edge. Queries aren’t shared with advertisers and don’t affect search ranking.
What the admin has to do
Here, default settings and tenant policies matter more than the license itself, so the list below is the first thing to go through with IT.
- Decide on web search. The “Allow web search in Copilot” policy works through Cloud Policy and the Copilot Control System, including for licensed users. When it’s off, Copilot Chat relies on the model alone, and answers are based only on the model’s training data, which limits how current they are.
- Unblock the *.api.powerplatform.com endpoint on the firewall and proxy if the team is going to build agents.
- Decide on Agent Builder, on publishing prompt collections to the whole tenant, and on turning on pay-as-you-go billing where it’s required.
- Drop network blocking as a way to manage Copilot. Microsoft doesn’t recommend or support managing Copilot Chat through network restrictions, because it can cause unpredictable app failures.
Where “included” ends
Using Copilot as a user doesn’t generate extra charges. Microsoft 365 Copilot is built natively on Work IQ and doesn’t need to call its APIs, so chat, in-app features and the agents natively included in the license aren’t billed separately.
A separate bill in credits starts only when your own agent calls the Work IQ APIs. Runtime for some agents is included in the license, under the licensed user’s identity and subject to fair usage limits that Microsoft can change, and going over purchased capacity can end in service denial.
What Microsoft Copilot won't do
Ten limitations that Microsoft documents but that can go unmentioned in a rollout conversation. Each one changes the scope of what you can promise your team.
Won’t work in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote without a paid license
Since April 15, 2026, Copilot Chat has been removed from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for the largest customers, and in smaller organizations it runs there in standard access, with lower quality at some times of day. Outlook and the Microsoft 365 Copilot web app remain.
Doesn’t know your whole company’s data in the no-cost chat
Copilot Chat is grounded only in web data. Full grounding in organizational content, through the semantic index and Work IQ, comes only with the paid license.
You can’t buy the add-on for one month
Monthly billing still requires an annual commitment, and the add-on can’t be bought without a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription.
You can’t talk to it by voice without a license
Voice features are currently reserved for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, meaning priority access. Microsoft says they will come to other users but gives no date.
You can’t launch your own agent by voice
Voice mode doesn’t accept @mentions of agents. Voice chats with agents are announced but don’t work today, and voice mode itself doesn’t create images or files and doesn’t work through CarPlay.
You can’t build an agent from your phone
Agent Builder isn’t available in mobile versions of the apps or sites. You also can’t run agents built in Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams Chat.
Won’t get around permissions
If a salesperson doesn’t have access to a SharePoint site, Teams channel or mailbox, the agent won’t surface content from those sources. That limits risk, and it also limits how useful the agent is for people with narrow permissions.
Won’t include custom agents in the price without caveats
Runtime for some agents is included in the license, with fair usage limits that Microsoft can change. An agent grounded in web knowledge runs at no cost, and other scenarios are paid in Copilot Credits or through pay-as-you-go billing.
Won’t keep everything in the EU
Web search queries sent from Copilot Chat to Bing aren’t EU Data Boundary compliant, and Bing acts there as an independent data controller.
Won’t roll itself out, and won’t work on a personal account
The Microsoft Copilot app and copilot.microsoft.com don’t support Microsoft Entra accounts, and a personal account isn’t covered by enterprise data protection. On the work side, publishing prompt collections to the whole tenant, turning on pay-as-you-go billing and blocking or unblocking agents are admin tasks.
The April 15, 2026 change was announced in Message Center posts MC1253858 and MC1253863. We know their content from secondary sources, and Microsoft’s official documentation confirms the end state through the in-product labels and its description of standard access. Check the scope for your tenant in your own Message Center.
Frequently asked questions
We have Microsoft 365 at work. Do our salespeople already have AI?
Probably yes. Copilot Chat is available at no additional cost to Microsoft Entra account users with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, and the list includes Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium, E3 and E5, and Office 365 E1, E3 and E5, including the no-Teams versions sold in the European Economic Area.
Salespeople get to it through the Microsoft 365 Copilot app or copilot.cloud.microsoft. Without a paid license, this chat is grounded in web data, and Outlook is the only place with access to correspondence.
What’s the difference between Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Copilot Chat comes at no extra cost with an eligible subscription and gives you web-grounded chat, file uploads, Copilot Pages, image generation and enterprise data protection.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot license adds Copilot in the Office apps and in Teams, priority access, voice features, Agent Builder and Copilot Studio, plus the semantic index and full access to work data through Work IQ. To see which version a salesperson has, check the label in the apps: “M365 Copilot (Premium)”, “M365 Copilot (Basic)” or “Copilot chat (Basic)”.
Can we build our own agent on our materials without a developer?
Yes. Agent Builder works from instructions and knowledge sources in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 connectors, with no code.
Three things need to be settled up front. First, you build at a computer, because there’s no mobile version. Second, IT has to unblock the *.api.powerplatform.com endpoint on the firewall and proxy. Third, automatic permissions for SharePoint files work only when you share with specific security groups, so in other cases you fix permissions manually. Integrations with external systems already require Copilot Studio.
Will Copilot summarize a sales meeting in Teams?
In meetings, Copilot uses the real-time transcript, answers questions about how the conversation went and keeps working after it ends. In VoIP and PSTN calls it captures key points, task owners and next steps.
There are two conditions: a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and transcription turned on.
How we teach this in the workshop
We don't try to talk anyone into switching tools. Workshop exercises run in whatever the company already has: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude.
If your company runs on Microsoft 365, we build the program around what your license actually includes: customer research and call prep from the inbox and calendar, proposal input, follow-ups and keeping CRM work in order. Before the training, we find out which tasks your salespeople handle and which tools they use, and we choose the modules based on that.
From the first day after the workshop, the team works with ready-to-use agents and a prompt collection. The core program has 11 modules covering the whole sales process, from fundamentals and research, through building assistants, prospecting and call prep, to proposals, AI agents and account management.
Sources
The links below go to Microsoft’s documentation, opened and read on August 12, 2026. What the Copilot license covers has changed during this year, so open these pages again before you make a purchasing decision.
- Manage Copilot Chat
- Copilot Chat privacy and protections
- Microsoft 365 Copilot overview
- Standard versus priority access to features in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
- Release notes for Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Agent Builder overview
- Choose between Agent Builder and Copilot Studio to build your agent
- Frequently asked questions about voice features in Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Get started with voice features in Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Get started with the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app
- Supported languages for Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise pricing
- Microsoft 365 Copilot small business pricing
All sources accessed on August 12, 2026. We update this page when features that matter for sales work change.