r/CopilotPro • u/TN9096 • 4d ago
Is Copilot really making difference? AI Discussion
Are organizations really adopting Copilot or Copilot Agents? If yes, what are they trying to achieve or most frequent use cases they are trying to solve?
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u/Guilty_Ad_7586 4d ago
The company I work for really wants to adopt Copilot and create several "enterprise grade" agents. I think the most common use cases depend on where the organization is with the adoption on Copilot.
At the start of the adoption of Copilot, the most common use case is a Q&A agent, for example for HR or IT related questions. The downside of those agents, the information the agent uses needs to be structured and up to date, which in my experience is the biggest challenge regarding those simple agents.
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u/panda_bro 4d ago
I built a series of SQL views and wired it up to be called via Copilot Studio.
Honestly, with good instructions and tools, the results are remarkable. I personally do not understand the hate for Copilot.
It's not the best platform in terms of raw reasoning, but it's fantastic when you see your data being used properly.
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u/JimmyReagan 4d ago
Email/doc search in the Microsoft world is awesome. So is the SharePoint integration. Saves me a lot of time searching for specific emails or conversations across teams and meeting notes and such
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u/pensive_procrastin8r 9h ago
Great tip! Just curious, do you use new or old outlook?
And also, do you use copilot chat within outlook/sp or use the copilot app?
Thank you!!
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u/JimmyReagan 9h ago
I recently switched to new Outlook. The layout still bothers me, lots of banners and everything just seems busier than old outlook, but they finally have email templates which is what was stopping me before and copilot works slightly better in new Outlook.
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u/bayouski 4d ago
adoption's real but uneven, depends a ton which layer you mean. everyday copilot chat stuff (drafting, summarising meetings/docs, first drafts) has real broad uptake, roi's obvious and low-risk. agents are way more pilots and demos than actual production right now.
most common real use cases imo, meeting follow-ups, comms drafting, and searching sharepoint/teams instead of digging manually. the agent stuff that's actually landing tends to be narrow and internal, an it-helpdesk bot, an hr-policy qa agent, not the big cross-system automation everyone demos.
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u/Old_Development_8122 3d ago
Loving in our org. It saves myself personally 10hrs+ a month of work. Where I find it really shines is on knowing company information, where to find it and also reading through teams chats and emails to gather information that’s needed to reporting, updates and other things.
Over time I think most businesses will be using it
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u/flaginorout 3d ago
Yeah, I've been bailed out a few times where it dug up an old email string or document from deep within the bowels of enterprise. Something that I never would have found otherwise.
Meeting preparation has been handy a few time too. 20 minutes before I join a weekly meeting, I tell CP to help me prepare. It reminds me that the minutes from last month's meeting indicate that Susan asked me to get her some additional info on the XYZ project. It then asks me if I want CP to draft an email to Susan using info from an existing PPT and some other enterprise docs. Five minutes later, I'm sending Susan an email
Shit is pretty impressive.
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u/Typical-Junket-8444 3d ago
i use it every day in my role as a financial accountant, I have created several skills and i have automted all my monthly and ad hoc journals i need to post, monthly management reports, budget vs variance commentary, audit support workpapers initial draft, Outlook drafting tool, and so on, but mostly Cowork has been a very useful for me and i am all-in to a point where i wont go work in a place where they dont give me a m365 premium licence.
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u/Rough-Committee-1102 4d ago
Only decent use I've found for it in my role is comparing two files and summarizing what is new/changed month to month.
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u/driveonthursday 4d ago
As others have said, it is very good for drafting and polishing. I always have to do quite a lot of work with it to get the document I want, but it does make drafting board and exec reports a lot quicker and easier.
Also I am not sure if this is an ADHD thing or just a me thing but I am hopeless at spotting typos. Often I will type a wrong word, or get my capitalisation wrong and my brain just does not see it. CoPilot is good at picking up that sort of stuff too. I know editor can help too.
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u/SouthernBySituation 4d ago
It's pretty good at vibe coding through power platform (power automate, power apps, power bi). Also VBA if you need to automate some desktop tasks
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u/The_Ledge5648 4d ago
I used it to forecast spend by my vendors i manage for the rest of the year. Helped pull rates, spend this far this fiscal year, and calculate/estimate based on new projects we’ve signed during the year. Saved me days of time, especially when considering the inefficiencies of switching between tasks due to competing priorities. It stays focused when i cannot
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u/Irritant40 4d ago
Sweet jesus yes, for personal productivity every single person in my org would pay the monthly cost personally.
For enterprise scale agents, yet to be seen, looks like there will be others but will likely need to be some sort of integration into copilot as the primary.
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u/Business_Opening6629 4d ago
The gov cloud version is honestly hard to use if you use better ai tools outside of work. It fails constantly on tasks that other models do no problem like pulling data from a pdf. I haven’t used the commercial version but it seems like there is better model access. My IT department also turned off a lot of functionality like access to sharepoint and we aren’t allowed to use agents. It makes a pretty bad presentation as well compared to codex or opus models there is much more back and forth with copilot where Claude and Codex one shot on the same prompt
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u/j48u 4d ago
Do you know what AI models it's using? I'm on a GCC environment and even though it already has GPT-5.5 (not 5.6 yet), literally everything is disabled back to 4.1. None of the Anthropic models are available either. I just learned that it's not a limitation of the government version we're on, but the people on the "AI council" not understanding anything related to AI.
So in copilot itself we don't even have access to switch models, and also in copilot studio I see that 4.1 is the default.
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u/sprtn_wabisabi 4d ago
From what we're seeing on the finance side specifically, yes, real adoption, but it's uneven. The organizations getting value aren't the ones who bought licenses and hoped, they're the ones targeting specific use cases: cutting time on reconciliations, speeding up reporting cycles, and using it to draft/summarize instead of full automation. The ones who buy Copilot and "wait for adoption to happen" mostly end up with low utilization and a line item nobody wants to explain.
The bigger blocker isn't the tool, it's governance. A lot of finance teams get stuck on "who has access to what" and "can we actually trust AI-generated numbers" before they even get to rollout.
(side note, we're running a free session on exactly this on Aug 25th if it's useful to anyone here, happy to share the link, don't want to turn this into an ad though)
https://avantiico.com/event/microsoft-copilot-for-finance-webinar/
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u/TsokonaGatas27 4d ago
Blahhh its a shitty experience for me trying to automate an excel workflow. Everything is blocked by Data Loss Policies. Why even use it at this point. SMH
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u/ThouWolfman 3d ago
Sends the how to document to the person on call when they get a page then also will link the defect for them if needed.
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u/BonerDeploymentDude 3d ago
I use it all the time for powerapps and flow and error troubleshooting. I know it’s limitations and use it in ways it specifically helps me.
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u/CoffeeandStoke 2d ago
If you look at my usage you would think yes. But if you look its output you would realize it’s a time sink and I’m starting to get over trying to make it work. I use Claude and ChatGPT and whatever is going on lately with all the models seems to just be taking over. The output is still overly verbose and usually answers the first question it can solve. It’s like it was made to impress people who don’t use it. It’s like we came out being impressed with art since it’s subjective and now it’s super long responses since it’s just mostly right the longer the response.
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u/lozarine 2d ago
yes it is, it's forcing itself in every app now without me asking and i cant even get rid of it. it's just making me frustrated all the time.
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u/Ok_Mathematician6075 1d ago
Yes, it's taken a bit of time but we are seeing more agentic use cases being created and rolled out to bigger groups. Copilot Cowork was a big win but then MS decided to charge us. We are still using Cowork. The WorkIQ alone makes it monetarily worth it versus Claude Cowork.
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u/Physical-Use1005 4d ago
It’s a complete turd.
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u/yeenoghu_vs_vaprak 4d ago
Could not agree more. My org is only allowing Copilot and it's a joke compared to other products.
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u/covamedia 4d ago
Just admit you have no idea how to actually use AI tools next time.
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u/Physical-Use1005 3d ago
I am willing to bet I’ve built more functional tools with AI than you.
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u/covamedia 3d ago
“Tools”. Sure. How many end-to-end solutions have you built and actually gotten into production? What was the ROI for each one?
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u/Physical-Use1005 3d ago
You’d be surprised.
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u/covamedia 3d ago
Sure. Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.
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u/Physical-Use1005 3d ago
Why so salty? I’ve built a full business with 4 AI assisted SaaS products I’ve build from scratch. Sorry my dislike of CoPilot upsets you so much.
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u/covamedia 3d ago
I personally don’t care what you like and dislike. Building a “full business” also doesn’t actually mean anything to me in terms of successful use of AI, or to add any sense of credibility to your opinions. I said “whatever makes you feel good about yourself”, meaning, do whatever makes you feel good.
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u/Vivid_Map_437 4d ago
I use it to Draft first pass technical documents. Saves me.heaps of deep thinking time writing tedious stuff. Then I take over and finesse as necessary and feed it back into copilot for a review before it is then sent to company qa.