Microsoft Copilot 101: from your first chat to building agents

There is a good chance Copilot is already on your computer. It sits in the Windows taskbar, in the Edge browser, inside Word and Outlook, in Teams meetings — and, for programmers, inside their code editor. Microsoft has put its AI assistant almost everywhere people work.

That reach is Copilot’s superpower and its biggest source of confusion, because “Copilot” is not one product but a family. This guide untangles it. We start with the story and the idea behind the name, then learn how Copilot actually finds its answers, get started at home step by step, go through Office and work use, and finish with the builder’s side: agents, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Foundry.

What is Copilot?

Copilot is Microsoft’s name for its AI assistants. The name is the idea: an aircraft’s co-pilot helps the pilot fly, but the pilot stays in command. Copilot drafts, summarises, analyses and suggests; you decide what to keep.

There are four main members of the family, and which one you use depends on who you are and what account you sign in with:

Microsoft’s AI story

Microsoft did not build the first Copilot models itself. Its big bet was a partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, starting in 2019: Microsoft’s Azure cloud provided the computing power, and Microsoft got to build OpenAI’s models into its products. Today Copilot uses models from several makers, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft’s own MAI team.

How Copilot works

At the core of every Copilot is a large language model — the same kind of technology behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. What makes Microsoft 365 Copilot different is what happens around the model. Before the model writes a word, an orchestrator gathers relevant material from your work world, a step called grounding.

Microsoft Graph is the map of your work: your emails, files, meetings, chats, calendar and colleagues. Work IQ is Microsoft’s intelligence layer that lets Copilot and agents reason over that organisational knowledge, and the semantic index finds content by meaning, so “the Pune expansion deck” can match a file called “West-region growth v3”. Crucially, all of it is security-trimmed: Copilot only sees what you, personally, already have permission to open.

Getting started at home, step by step

1. Open Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com, or open the Copilot app on Windows, Mac, iPhone or Android.
2. Sign in with a personal Microsoft account (the one for Outlook.com, Xbox or OneDrive). This saves your conversations and unlocks more features. At work, sign in with your work account instead — it gives you the protected work version.
3. Learn the screen — it is deliberately simple:

4. Ask for something real — a meal plan, an explanation of a confusing letter, a message you’re struggling to write — and keep refining with follow-ups.
5. Use Think deeper for hard problems such as comparing loan offers or planning a complex itinerary. It is slower but checks its own work.
6. Turn to Pages when a chat produces something worth keeping: a Page is an editable document you and Copilot can keep improving and share with others.

Copilot on Windows, in Edge and on your phone

• Windows. Press the Copilot key on newer keyboards, or click Copilot on the taskbar. With Copilot Vision you can share a window or your screen and ask about what’s on it: “why is this Excel formula giving #REF?”, “which of these settings turns off notifications?”
• Edge. The Copilot button summarises the page you’re reading, compares products across tabs and answers questions about a PDF open in the browser. Copilot Mode in Edge goes further, helping with multi-step tasks across tabs — with your permission.
• Phone. Install the Copilot app for iPhone or Android. The camera is the highlight: point it at a plant, a restaurant menu in Marathi, or a maths problem and ask away. Voice conversations are natural enough for language practice.

Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook

With a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscription at home — or a work licence — a Copilot button appears inside the Office apps themselves. This is where Copilot saves the most time, because it works on the document you already have open.

• Word: draft from a few notes, rewrite a paragraph in a different tone, summarise a 40-page report, ask questions about the document.
• Excel: ask questions of your data in plain words, get formulas explained or written, and generate charts and PivotTables. Keep data in a proper table for best results.
• PowerPoint: create a deck from a prompt or from a Word document, then restyle, add slides, or summarise someone else’s presentation.
• Outlook: summarise long threads, draft replies, and use coaching to check the tone and clarity of an important email before sending.

Copilot at work: Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot

At work, what you get depends on the licences your organisation has assigned. Microsoft Learn describes three levels:

Signed in with a work account, every level is covered by Enterprise Data Protection: prompts and responses get the same contractual protections as your company’s email in Exchange and files in SharePoint. With the full licence, Copilot can pull from your mail, files and meetings automatically — “what did the client say about pricing in last week’s calls?” — and use agents such as Researcher, for deep multi-source reports, and Analyst, for working through data.

Teams is where many people first feel the difference: Copilot can summarise a meeting you missed, list the action items, and answer questions like “did anyone disagree with the launch date?”.

Prompting with GCSE

Microsoft teaches a four-part prompt recipe: Goal, Context, Source, Expectations. It is the same idea as the six ingredients in our ChatGPT guide, with one Copilot-specific twist — Source — because at work Copilot can reach your actual files.

A few more habits that pay off:

• Name the files. Type / to pick a document, email or meeting, rather than hoping Copilot finds the right one.
• Check the citations. Hover over the little numbers to see which file each claim came from.
• Iterate in the same chat: “make it shorter”, “add a table of risks”, “now write the email to the team”.
• Save your best prompts. Microsoft’s Prompt Gallery has examples to adapt, and you can save your own.

Permissions and privacy

The most important technical fact about Microsoft 365 Copilot is this: it can only see what you can see. Two people asking the same question can get different answers, because Copilot grounds each answer only in content that person already has access to. Try it:

That rule has a flip side. If a file is shared too widely — say, a salary sheet on a site “Everyone” can open — nobody may have noticed it for years. Copilot makes it easy to find. The fix is to tidy permissions, not to blame the AI.

Privacy checklist

• Use the right account. Work content belongs in Copilot signed in with your work account, where Enterprise Data Protection applies — not in your personal account.
• At home, review Copilot’s privacy settings, including personalisation and memory, and delete conversations you don’t want kept.
• Don’t share secrets such as passwords, card numbers or Aadhaar and passport numbers.
• Check before you send. Copilot can be confidently wrong; verify numbers, names and dates in anything that leaves your hands.

Agents and Copilot Studio

An agent is a focused version of Copilot with its own instructions, knowledge and actions — an HR policy helper, an IT help desk, a sales-proposal assistant. There are three ways to make one, from no code to full code:

1. Agent Builder inside Microsoft 365 Copilot: describe what you want in plain words, point it at SharePoint sites or files, and share it with your team.
2. Copilot Studio: Microsoft’s low-code tool for richer agents with triggers, workflows, connectors to hundreds of business systems, and hand-off to people.
3. Microsoft 365 Agents Toolkit in Visual Studio Code: professional developers define agents as code and ship them through the normal release process.

The simplest kind is a declarative agent: it runs on Microsoft 365 Copilot’s own orchestrator and models, and is defined almost entirely by configuration. Here is a simplified example of what that configuration describes:

{
  "name": "Policy Buddy",
  "description": "Answers questions about our HR and travel policies.",
  "instructions": "You help employees of Contoso India understand HR and travel policies. Answer only from the policy documents. Quote the section you used. If the policies don't cover it, say so and suggest emailing hr@contoso.example.",
  "capabilities": [
    {
      "name": "OneDriveAndSharePoint",
      "items_by_url": [
        { "url": "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/HR/Policies" }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "conversation_starters": [
    { "title": "Leave", "text": "How many casual leaves do I get this year?" },
    { "title": "Travel", "text": "What is the hotel limit for a trip to Mumbai?" }
  ]
}

GitHub Copilot: Copilot for code

GitHub Copilot — owned by Microsoft through GitHub — was the original Copilot and remains one of the most widely used AI coding tools. It lives in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs and other editors, on GitHub.com, in a desktop app and in the terminal.

 1  def price_with_gst(amount: float, rate: float = 0.18) -> float:
 2      """Return amount including GST, rounded to 2 decimals."""
 3      return round(amount * (1 + rate), 2)   ⇥ Tab to accept
 4
 5  def split_bill(total, people):
 6      return [round(total / people, 2)] * people

• Code completion: suggestions appear in grey as you type; press Tab to accept.
• Chat and agent mode: ask questions about your code, or let Copilot plan and make multi-file changes, run commands and fix its own errors.
• Coding agent: assign a GitHub issue to Copilot and it works in the background, then opens a pull request for you to review.
• Code review, CLI and MCP: AI review comments on pull requests, a terminal agent, and connections to other tools through the Model Context Protocol.

There is a free plan with a monthly allowance, free access for verified students, individual paid tiers (Pro, Pro+ and Max) and Business and Enterprise plans for organisations.

Building your own app: Microsoft Foundry

To build AI into your own product, Microsoft’s platform is Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry). It offers a catalogue of models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral and others, plus tools for agents, evaluation, safety filters and monitoring, all inside your Azure subscription.

Create a Foundry project in the Azure portal, deploy a model, then install the SDK with pip install "azure-ai-projects>=2.3.0" azure-identity and sign in with az login:

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.ai.projects import AIProjectClient

# From your Foundry project's overview page
FOUNDRY_PROJECT_ENDPOINT = "https://<resource>.services.ai.azure.com/api/projects/<project>"

project = AIProjectClient(
    endpoint=FOUNDRY_PROJECT_ENDPOINT,
    credential=DefaultAzureCredential(),   # uses your 'az login' session
)
openai = project.get_openai_client()

response = openai.responses.create(
    model="gpt-5-mini",   # the name of a model you deployed in Foundry
    input="Write a friendly 2-line reminder about Friday's fire drill.",
)
print(response.output_text)

The same project can host agents with saved instructions and multi-turn conversations, connect them to tools and data, and run evaluations to check quality and safety before you ship. Enterprises like Foundry for the governance: identity through Microsoft Entra, network isolation, content filters and usage monitoring.

Which plan do I need?

For home users, the free Copilot app covers chat, voice, vision and image creation. Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook comes with a Microsoft 365 subscription:

At work, your organisation chooses: Copilot Chat is included with eligible work accounts, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence is an add-on. For code, see GitHub’s plans; for building, Foundry is pay-as-you-go through Azure.

Your 30-day path

One small step a day, from first chat to your first agent.

Quick quiz

Tap a question to check your answer.

That is the whole Copilot family, from the key on your keyboard to agents of your own. Start with the one closest to your day — and remember the name: it is your co-pilot, and you are still flying the plane. ✈️

Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft 365, Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Windows and Edge are products of Microsoft, and GitHub Copilot is a product of GitHub; this article is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by either. Licence tiers and the grounding process follow Microsoft Learn, consumer plans follow Microsoft’s plan pages, GitHub plans follow GitHub Docs, and Foundry code follows Microsoft’s quickstart, all as of 24 September 2026. The agent definition is simplified; screens are illustrations; the company in the permission demo is fictional. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.