Copilot

Where does your data go?

Copilot isn't one product — it's at least three, with different data rules. The split is the whole story:

• Consumer Copilot (personal Microsoft account): trains on your conversations by default. Opt out via Privacy → Training on conversation activity. History retained 18 months. Personalized ads — opt-out exists.
• Copilot inside Microsoft 365 consumer apps (Word, Excel, Outlook with Personal/Family): not used for training. Period.
• Work/school accounts: the strongest guarantees of the four tools. Enterprise Data Protection — prompts and responses never train foundation models, Microsoft acts as data processor under contract, and your tenant's permissions carry into Copilot.
• Human review exists — but Microsoft publishes no fixed retention number for reviewed chats. Weaker disclosure than Google's stated three years.

What happens when it's wrong?

Copilot publishes no hallucination numbers of its own, and the honest answer is: it's an OpenAI engine with Microsoft's wiring.

• The models are GPT-family (GPT-5.6 is the current preferred model in M365 Copilot), so the ChatGPT failure analysis transfers: strong on documents you hand it, unreliable on facts from memory, confident either way.
• Bing grounding is built in — web answers arrive pre-grounded, the same mitigation that pulls ChatGPT's error rate from 47% to roughly 10%.
• A name trap that costs accuracy: "Copilot" spans the consumer chatbot, Copilot Chat (web-grounded only), and full M365 Copilot (can read your work files). Results differ wildly between them, and the naming makes it genuinely hard to know which one you're talking to. When a summary reads wrong, first check whether you asked the right Copilot.

What's it actually bad at?

• Product-line confusion — the worst of the four. Free Copilot, Copilot Pro, Copilot Chat, Copilot Business, Copilot Enterprise: five names, overlapping features, different data rules, different licenses.
• Standalone value is thin. Outside the Microsoft apps, the consumer chatbot is a me-too product. The reason to be here is Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams.
• No published accuracy benchmarks for Copilot as a product — you're evaluating the underlying OpenAI models by proxy.
• Work-account deletion is all-or-nothing — Copilot history clears across every app at once, not per-app.

What does it cost really?

The traps: the headline $18–21 number is an add-on price — compared against ChatGPT Business ($20 all-in) it only looks cheap until you add the base license. Copilot Business tops out at 300 users. The promo is first-year only, requires an annual commitment, and auto-renews at the standard rate. The pricing pages hide the base-license requirement in footnotes.

What does it replace — and what do you still do?

The work version genuinely changes how the suite is used: drafting inside Word against your own documents, spreadsheet analysis in Excel, meeting recaps in Teams, email triage in Outlook. You still own: factual verification, final judgment, and a human pass on anything customer-facing — same as the other three. The differentiator: Copilot operates on your files under your permissions, which makes output easier to verify — and means a wrong answer arrives wearing your data's clothes.

What the ecosystem offers

• Copilot Studio — Microsoft's build-your-own-assistant workshop: describe a recurring job, and the assistant handles it — including ones that operate a whole cloud PC. Agents that create Office files run in secure sandboxes.
• Governance: every assistant gets its own identity and permissions automatically — a real differentiator if you need to prove who did what. Admins can audit every agent in the company.
• The 2026 app cadence: assistants that follow you between SharePoint and OneDrive, Excel change-history (who edited what, restore to a previous state), Teams meeting recaps in different languages, and Outlook that manages Planner tasks.
• Admin analytics: usage reports and developer-credit tracking, without exposing personal data.
• The naming soup, updated: the five product names have converged into one platform — the confusion now lives in the license tiers, not the products. The review's core criticism stands, redirected.

If I stop paying, what do I lose?

• Export: yes, self-serve — the Microsoft privacy dashboard exports Copilot history as CSV, covering the consumer app, in-app Copilot, and Copilot Chat separately. Clunky but complete — and the only one of the four that exports as structured data.
• Deletion: self-serve — per item or all-at-once on consumer; work-account deletion runs through the admin portal, "might take some time," and covers all apps at once.
• Downgrade: clean — drop the add-on, keep Microsoft 365, keep your files. The AI leaves; your documents stay. Healthier than most.
• 18-month history default on consumer — adjustable only by manual deletion.
• The lock-in reality: the exit cost is the suite, not the assistant — but Microsoft 365 exports to open formats cleanly, so the lock-in is softer than Google's.

Who is this NOT for?

Businesses not already on Microsoft 365 — the add-on structure only makes sense with a base license you already need, and ChatGPT Business is cheaper all-in otherwise. Also not for anyone who wants one clear product: if the five-name product line exhausts you, that fatigue is the pricing strategy. And the free consumer tier is not for sensitive data — training defaults on.