7 April 2026 · 2 min read · John
Microsoft wants every small business on Copilot. They've launched a cheaper licence aimed at firms under 300 people, bundled it with existing M365 plans, and run promotional pricing to get you in the door. The pitch is simple: AI inside Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, working with your data.
The numbers tell a different story. After two years on the market, roughly 3% of Microsoft 365's 450 million commercial users pay for Copilot. Almost half of the people who tried it and stopped said they didn't trust the answers. Even Microsoft's own sales teams struggled to make it stick.
For a larger company with an IT team, a data governance setup, and time to run a proper pilot, Copilot can work. The meeting summaries are useful. Email drafting saves time. It's a decent general-purpose assistant if you've got the infrastructure to support it.
Most small firms don't. If you've got a team of ten or fewer, you probably don't have sensitivity labels on your SharePoint, a permissions audit ready to go, or someone whose job it is to train the team on prompts.
Then there's the cost. The SME price is £16 per user per month. For a team of ten, that's nearly £2,000 a year on top of your existing M365 subscription — for a tool that, without proper setup, most of your team will quietly stop using within a few weeks.
The firms I talk to don't want a general-purpose assistant that works across every Microsoft app. They want specific things: faster proposals, better first-draft emails, client-ready documents that sound like them. Tools that fit how they already work — not something that requires them to change.
That's a different problem from the one Copilot solves. Copilot is broad by design. For a 500-person company, that breadth is the point. For a small firm, it's the weakness — too much surface area, not enough depth where it actually matters.
I think so. Rather than bolting a general AI layer onto everything, start with the one or two tasks that eat up the most time — proposals, follow-up emails, document drafting — and get those working properly. Tools built around your business, your tone, your clients. No prompt engineering. No governance audit. Just something that works on Monday morning.
That's what we do at Aigura. Not because Copilot is bad — it isn't — but because for firms under 50 people, a focused approach gets better results faster, at a fraction of the overhead.
If that sounds more like what you need, let's have a conversation. Twenty minutes, no commitment.
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Book a free 20-minute call →For most small businesses, Copilot is hard to justify. Only around 3% of Microsoft 365's 450 million commercial users pay for it, and nearly half of those who tried it stopped because they didn't trust the answers. Without an IT team, data governance setup, and staff training, most small teams stop using it within weeks.
Microsoft's SME Copilot licence costs £16 per user per month. For a team of ten, that's nearly £2,000 a year on top of an existing Microsoft 365 subscription — before any setup, training, or governance work is factored in.
Rather than a broad AI layer across all your apps, small professional services firms tend to get better results from tools configured around specific tasks — proposals, client emails, document drafting. These require less setup, no prompt engineering expertise, and deliver faster practical returns than a general-purpose assistant like Copilot.
Adoption is low because Copilot requires infrastructure most small firms don't have — permissions management, sensitivity labels, and staff training. Without those foundations, the tool underdelivers and gets abandoned. Microsoft's own sales teams have struggled to make it stick even in larger organisations.