AI’s Quiet Revolution: Content, Conversations, and Cost in the Summer of Copilot
Welcome to this week’s Copilot Navigator! Here’s a quick recap:
#SummerOfCopilot Week 6
Week 1: Microsoft Copilot – A Bold Vision for AI Transformation - #SummerOfCopilot
Week 2: AI Co-Workers Arrive: A Week with Microsoft’s Researcher & Analyst Agents
Week 3: Making the Invisible Visible: Tacit Knowledge Meets Copilot
Week 4: Unlocking Productivity: Copilot, ChatGPT, and AI Agents in Action – plus Copilot training resources
Week 5: From Studio to Control: Building Smarter, Safer Workplaces with Microsoft Copilot
Our next few issues:
Week 7: Six (or Seven) Ideas for the Future of Copilot also to be covered on a special episode of our Polaris podcast next week)
Week 8: Copilot for Leadership Part 1 (CEO, Boards of Directors, CFO, CMO, CRO)
Week 9: Copilot for Leadership Part 2 (CHRO, COO, CIO, CDO, CAIO and CISO)
After that we’re planning to look at real world case studies – if there’s no breaking news that happens first.
Today, we’ll start with some very recent feature announcements on the Copilot roadmap. Then we’ll dive more deeply into approaches for managing Copilot costs and licenses. And I’ll wrap up by looking at how to use SharePoint Autofill to automatically enrich metadata columns with natural language prompts.
🚀 Latest Copilot News and Updates
It’s been an exciting summer for AI in the enterprise. Major organizations are jumping on board – for instance, Barclays announced plans to roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 100,000 employees (a bold move that shows how fast businesses are embracing AI).
Microsoft isn’t slowing down either. Recent Copilot roadmap updates bring several new features that sharpen your productivity tools:
🧠 Researcher in Word (Preview) – You can now invoke Copilot’s Researcher directly inside Word — no more bouncing between chat, browser, and doc. This seamless integration means less context-switching and more focus for your team. (It also shows its work and cites sources, so you can trust the info. Rollout starts July 16. Roadmap ID: 497833 | Preview Available: July 2025
📊 Copilot + SharePoint Content – Copilot can now pull images and slides from your organization’s SharePoint organization asset library (and even third-party libraries like Templafy) when building PowerPoint decks. We’ve tested this—it works best when you start with a Copilot-optimized template and a well-maintained asset library. Pro tip: desktop app > web, and clean up your organization asset library (old screenshots or logos) for best results. Keeping things on-brand has never been easier. Roadmap ID: 496365 | Rollout Start: July 2025
🛒 Pre-purchase Capacity Packs – New Copilot Capacity Packs allow IT admins to buy extra Copilot usage in advance. Why does this matter? If your team loves Copilot Chat or a custom AI agent you’ve built, you can negotiate for volume discounts on the AI actions they consume. It’s like budgeting for a project upfront – helping larger organizations save on costs as usage grows. Roadmap ID: 496139 | Rollout Start: July 2025
📎 Email Attachment Summaries – Copilot’s email replies are getting smarter. Now when Copilot drafts an email, it will list out any attachments from the thread or original message right in the draft. It’s a small tweak that ensures nothing falls through the cracks – you won’t accidentally forget to mention “see attached report” in a reply. Little details = fewer follow-ups later. Roadmap ID: 497909 | Rollout Start: July 2025
✉️ Outlook Proactive Drafts (Preview) – Imagine opening Outlook and finding that Copilot has already drafted responses to some emails for you. This feature is rolling out now, suggesting replies before you even ask. If the suggested reply sounds like something you’d say, you just hit send – a huge time-saver. If not, no harm done; you can tweak or ignore it. Over time, as Copilot learns your tone, this could free you from the email rush hour and let you focus on bigger things. Roadmap ID: 497671 | Preview Available: July 2025
These enhancements may feel incremental, but together they create a more fluid, intuitive work experience. In short: your AI assistant is getting better at fitting into how you work day to day. For business leaders, that means your team can spend less time hunting for info or drafting routine emails and more time on strategic work. (For the full list of updates, see the https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap for details.)
🗣️ Voice and AI: A New Interface (With a Dose of Caution)
One particularly intriguing update: Microsoft is testing voice-activated Copilot chats. Soon you’ll be able to say “Hey Copilot” on your phone or PC and ask a question out loud. (This is rolling out in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for Wndows this summer.)
It’s a glimpse of a very natural future interface – imagine walking around the office asking your AI to pull up data, draft a message, or summarize a meeting, all hands-free. For busy leaders bouncing between meetings, the productivity appeal is huge.
But (and this is a big but) we need to think through the risks in shared work environments. If Copilot simply responds to any voice in the room, someone could try to query sensitive info from your AI. At home, if I yell a command to Alexa in the kitchen and a different device answers in the living room, it’s no big deal – maybe a timer ends up on the wrong speaker. In the office, though, we don’t want a coworker’s “Hey Copilot” triggering access to your data.
It’s critical that voice AI knows who’s speaking before delivering potentially sensitive answers. (The initial roadmap ID 497848 didn’t confirm whether voice recognition or similar safeguards will be in place, which is a crucial detail.) As leaders, we should keep an eye on this and ask Microsoft for clarity.
The bottom line on voice: it’s a promising step toward more intuitive tech, but implementing it right will require thoughtful policies and trust. We’re encouraging Microsoft to be transparent about how voice data is handled and to build in safeguards from day one. As with any innovation, a little caution and guidance will go a long way to making sure new tech boosts productivity without unintended security hiccups.
💡 Smarter Ways to Manage Copilot Costs
As you roll out these AI tools, an important question inevitably comes up: What’s this going to cost, and how do we control it? Microsoft has heard this loud and clear from customers. Beyond the standard $30/user monthly Copilot license, they’ve introduced more flexible pay-as-you-go options and, crucially, new tools to monitor and manage usage.
If you choose to enable Copilot features without buying a license for everyone, you can pay per use (for example, per AI-generated message or action). Imagine giving a whole department access to Copilot Chat but only paying when someone actually uses it. This model is great for early experimentation – it lowers the barrier to trying Copilot broadly, because you’re not committing to full licenses up front. (In fact, Microsoft lets you enable Copilot Chat and agents tenant-wide and simply bill per message at roughly $0.01 each).
To help keep an eye on things, the Copilot Control System in the Microsoft 365 admin center now provides detailed usage reports (rolling out this month). You can see how many AI calls are being made, which teams or individuals are using Copilot the most, and even break it down by the type of Copilot (for instance, usage of a custom sales support agent vs. general Copilot in Word).
This transparency is key to responsible AI adoption. We’ve been working with clients in preview who set up budget alerts in Azure Cost Management – so if Copilot usage charges go beyond a certain threshold, the admin gets a notification. It’s very similar to how you’d watch cloud compute costs. The takeaway: you’re in control, with data to guide your decisions. No surprises on the bill (Azure’s cost alerts can be configured to help monitor spending.)
Licensing strategy.
That brings us to licensing strategy. Microsoft now offers two main ways to pay for Copilot: per-user licenses or pay-as-you-go consumption. Each has its sweet spot. If you have a group of power users – say your content creators or data analysts who live in Copilot every day – the $30 flat license gives them unlimited usage and peace of mind (no meter running). It’s predictable and easy to budget. On the other hand, you might have a lot of employees who only need AI assistance occasionally. For those, a consumption model might make more sense: you only pay when they actually use Copilot.
Many Synozur clients are mixing models: for example, licensing the core team of “AI champions” and using pay-as-you-go for everyone else. Then, over time, they watch the usage reports. If certain teams start using Copilot heavily and regularly, it can be cheaper to flip them to a flat license. Microsoft has given you the flexibility to adjust in either direction as adoption grows.
📄 AI Transforming Content Management: SharePoint Autofill
Not all AI magic is flashy – some of it quietly revolutionizes the mundane work that eats up hours. Case in point: Autofill Columns in SharePoint. Rolled out earlier this year under the Microsoft Syntex umbrella, this feature might not grab headlines, but content managers are raving about it. Here’s what it does: when you upload a document, the AI automatically reads the file and fills in metadata tags for you.
Think about uploading a sales contract and instantly seeing the “Client Name”, “Contract Value”, or “Expiration Date” fields populate themselves based on the document text. It even generates a short summary if you have a description column. In our tests, we dropped in a batch of invoices and, without any special setup, Autofill correctly grabbed invoice numbers, dates, and totals for each file. No more chasing people to manually tag documents after the fact.
Why is this a big deal? Because well-tagged documents make everything easier – search, compliance, analytics – but nobody enjoys the chore of tagging. Often, important files end up with missing or inconsistent metadata, which later means wasted time searching or, worst case, compliance risks if records aren’t properly identified. Autofill swoops in to handle the drudge work of classification. Your team saves time, and your information gets more organized automatically. It’s a win-win.
Microsoft has also made this accessible to all kinds of organizations by dramatically cutting the cost. Autofill used to cost about 5¢ per page processed; as of March 2025 it’s about $0.005 (a fraction of a cent) per page – a 90% price drop (per Microsoft’s own documentation) . There’s even a free allowance of pages each month through 2025 for M365 customers to try it out, making it easy to pilot without budget concerns.
Of course, even a tireless AI assistant can make mistakes. We always tell clients: trust, but verify. In practice that means when you first turn on Autofill, have your team review the AI-generated tags for critical documents. In our experience so far, the AI is pretty accurate (often 80–90% on well-structured docs), but a quick human check ensures nothing important is misfiled. The beauty is, as your people correct any errors, the AI learns and gets better over time. Today, this feature feels like a quiet revolution in content management – not as showy as an AI chatbot, but incredibly valuable. Fewer hours spent on mind-numbing data entry means more hours devoted to high-value work that moves your business forward.
✅ Empowerment with Empathy
Bringing AI to work is really about helping people, not replacing them. The best results come when you get your team involved early, listen to their concerns, and show how these tools make their jobs better. If Copilot saves hours each week, talk about how that extra time can go towards more creative or meaningful work.
At Synozur, we’re excited about these developments because we’ve seen how tailored, human-centric solutions can transform work in practical ways. AI features that seemed futuristic a year ago are now here, and they’re quietly making everyday tasks easier and teams more effective. As always, the key is to adopt them thoughtfully: pilot in a controlled way, get feedback from your people, and refine how you use the tools so they truly fit your organization’s needs.
Ready to dig deeper into these topics? 👉 Check out the full Synozur blog post AI in Action: How New Copilot Features are Changing Content Management and Productivity for a deeper dive into Autofill’s technical tips, more roadmap insights, and guidance on optimizing Copilot for your organization. We go further into the “how” behind these features and share extra examples to help you on your AI journey.
Let’s keep the conversation going: How is your organization adopting AI this year, and what are you most excited (or concerned) about? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences as we navigate this #SummerOfCopilot together.
Editorial note: most of the images in this article were generated using AI. I’ve historically used Midjourney, Sora and OpenArt – but the latest updates to the Create agent in M365 Copilot have made it simple to create and enforce a brand kit. I often put the same prompt into multiple engines and select the “best” for further editing. However, real photography maters – so here’s a picture of Pike Place Market in Seattle last week. Happy summer.
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