I see CoPilot as building more efficiency into using Office365 toolset, is this a valid assumption? What are people's experiences in terms of the value of CoPilot?

We ran a pilot a year ago that showed modest productivity gains (2.5 hours per week), but benefits increased with continued use—suggesting the trial underestimated the impact of a full rollout with support and training. People loved it and didn’t want to lose access, with some offering to pay for it themselves.
Prior to the pilot, our organisation had undergone significant workforce reductions without redesigning processes or teams, leaving many teams under pressure and morale low. We're now expanding Copilot to 1,000 users. We don’t expect immediate hard benefits, as those were realised during the cuts, but we do expect improvements in morale and workload - i.e. enabling the hard benefits to be realised successfully. With Copilot Studio and the potential to redesign roles and workflows with agentic AI, further hard benefits may emerge. Popular use cases for copilot are support with document creation, summarising and reviewing large documents, checking compliance of long documents against a style guide or set of evaluation criteria, public-facing comms, project planning, program design, email management... The integration across app suite is not there yet (still clunky in ppt, word) but hoping it improves to unlock more use cases. This remains an experiment for us.

We are up to 700 M365 Copilot users. I agree the most value is within Teams with Summarizations and the Copilot Chat that does a wonderful job of pulling data from Teams, Outlook and even SharePoint. Copilot in other apps still need a lot of work - Word is ok, PowerPoint and Excel are just silly at least for now. I have personally enjoyed using Copilot in Whiteboards and OneNote. The biggest problem though is adoption, not because our employees don't want to use it, they just forget that it's there. We have to do numerous workshops and training sessions to remind people but also show how prompting can help them get the most out of it. Overall, while I see value but it's not enough for the cost yet.

We have been running a 30 person pilot of O365 Co Pilot. We are already an Enterprise ChatGPT shop but we wanted to test this out given the more natively integrated features to see how it works as a productivity tool.

Like many Microsoft products, it is evolving rapidly. Early feedback has been mixed. The main themes are:

Transcription summaries of calls - very good. However an understandable constraint with calls that are externally hosted that has triggered requests for assessing otter.ai and other such products.
Finding historical emails and chats - does a reasonable job here with some refining in prompting occasionally required. It doesn’t always respond well to looking at all history unless you prompt with a narrower timeframe.
Writing in your style - users have found GPT more effective. Am sure this will evolve.
Creating docs from notes or emails - if they could link a OneNote tab this would be very helpful.

Overall we won’t expand the pilot for some time but the few of us that have it will keep it to see how the product evolves.

O365 Copilot is a great tool for writing, organizing, summarizing, and managing emails. The quality of output, however, will always depend on the quality of the data. In TEAMS Copilot, for example, you must enable transcripts for meetings. To get good results, you should also have rich chat texts and information.

As far as Copilot Studio is concerned, it is a promising tool for creating customized agents (Agentic AI), and the quality will always depend on how you design it and for what purpose. As coding becomes easier and more efficient, it is indeed a paradigm shift.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, there are free tools that offer similar functionality , however, they are outside O365 platforms.

We have been running a business pilot of CoPilot for a few months now.  It varies by role but the most common positive feedback has been around meeting summarization & transcription to either catch up or generate meeting notes.  These features are all part of Teams premium which comes at a much lower price point than CoPilot.  Some of the analysis/content generation tools are interesting/useful to a few users, but not great.  I think we will likely adopt Teams premium for most users and limit CoPilot to a more select crowd that can use the other features.