Copilot Chat is included with Microsoft 365: what's the catch?

The catch is grounding, not a hidden fee. Copilot Chat, included at no extra cost with eligible Microsoft 365 business plans, answers from the web; it cannot see your files, emails or meetings, which is exactly what the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on sells. The included tier is real, useful, and also a very good advertisement for the upgrade.

Understood that way, the free tier is still worth switching on deliberately. It gives every staff member a capable assistant for drafting, rewriting, summarising pasted text and answering general questions, under business-grade protections when they are signed in with their work account, which makes it the sanctioned alternative to the public chatbots your team may already be using quietly. The setup is small: eligible plan, sign-in enforced, staff told it exists, and a line in your AI policy naming it as the approved default.

The second catch is subtler and worth naming plainly: included does not mean adopted. A free tier nobody was told about produces no value and no governance benefit, and staff who never hear otherwise will keep using whatever they found first. The afternoon of work that matters is not technical, it is communication, this is the tool, this is why, here is what never gets pasted into anything.

The honest position on the upgrade question: use the included tier as your pilot. If certain people keep wishing the assistant could see the thread, the file or the meeting, that wish is the business case for their paid licence, expressed in their own words, and it will identify the right three or four desks far more accurately than a licence-count conversation with any salesperson. If you want it enabled properly, sign-in enforced and settings sane, call 1800 456 567.