Microsoft 365 Copilot for SMEs: great in Office, and the rest?

If your business runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot is the obvious candidate. No new program, no new interface, just one more button in the programs your team has open anyway. That is a real advantage, and we do not underestimate it.

This article belongs to our series of comparisons: the same six questions for every tool, so you can lay the options side by side. We read Microsoft’s information on 14 October 2026; the sources are listed at the end.

What you use today

For firms of up to 300 people, Microsoft sells Copilot Business as an add-on to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium. In Switzerland it costs CHF 17.– per person per month on an annual commitment, excluding VAT. If you sign up before the end of 2026, the first year costs CHF 14.57. The Swiss price page also shows a monthly plan at CHF 20.40. Microsoft 365 itself comes on top, Business Standard at CHF 11.34, for example. Without a Copilot licence you have Copilot Chat: it mainly searches the web and works with files you upload.

Where Copilot is strong

Copilot knows your working day. With a licence it draws on the mail, files, meetings and chats each person has access to. It summarises a long thread in Outlook, writes the notes and actions after a Teams meeting, drafts in Word, analyses in Excel and builds slides in PowerPoint. Agents (An AI agent carries out several steps of a defined task. A person decides before it sends anything outside your firm or spends money.) such as Researcher and Analyst are included, and you can build your own in Copilot Studio.

The framework suits many SMEs too. Microsoft does not train its models on your prompts, responses or Microsoft 365 data. For Swiss tenants, the product terms say Copilot interactions are stored in Switzerland, in data centres in Geneva and Zurich. And Copilot only shows what the person is allowed to see anyway.

If your team spends the day in Outlook and Teams, that is a lot of help for CHF 17.– a month.

Where Copilot stops

• Copilot knows Microsoft 365, not your whole business. Bexio, Abacus, the transport system or the old folder on the server (A server is a computer that runs all the time and provides services to other devices, such as email, files or a website.) sit outside. Reaching them takes connectors or your own agents, and whoever builds them also has to run them. Some also use up credit in Copilot Studio.
• Copilot finds what your people may see. That is exactly the risk. Microsoft says SharePoint’s default sharing is the most permissive option. If permissions have grown rather than been planned, Copilot finds the payroll list as well. Tidy up before you switch it on.
• Storage in Switzerland does not happen by itself. For tenants created after 14 September 2026, the in-country storage setting is off by default. At peak load, Microsoft can move processing to the US, Canada or Australia unless your admin turns that off. Anthropic (An AI provider runs language models and sells access to them, for example OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Gemini).)’s models and Bing web search sit outside the EU Data Boundary.
• A workflow (A workflow specifies what information goes in, what happens to it and who checks the result.) is more than an answer. Copilot drafts and summarises. Turning an incoming invoice into a booking takes a workflow that connects systems, checks, and stops when a person has to decide. Copilot does not build that by itself.

Copilot connected to our platform

Your team stays in Outlook, Teams and Word. We set up an agent in Copilot Studio and connect it to the Jules Solutions Platform through its MCP gateway (MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for connecting an AI harness to other software and data sources.). Copilot Studio supports MCP officially; the connection runs through the Power Platform connectors and so under the policies your admin sets there. For people with a Copilot licence, using such agents inside Microsoft 365 is included within fair use.

After that, Copilot asks the platform as well as Microsoft 365. It creates tasks, has the document processing read invoices and delivery notes, writes to your database with its own structures, and starts workflows that talk to Bexio, Abacus or your transport system within the agreed scope. How a button in Outlook hands marked emails to an assistant that recognises, assigns, carries out and reports is shown in the case from our co-founder’s firm: ‘From inbox to booking: one click, full control’.

The platform stops where it matters: it sends a message to the outside or a payment only once a person has decided. The connection sees only the projects you grant it, and every call is in the log (A log records what a program or an AI agent did and when, so that afterwards you can trace who triggered what and what happened.). If your IT partner manages the tenant, we agree the permissions with them.

For five people: Operator System (Operator System is our package for teams at CHF 3'500.– to 5'000.–: the shared base with workflows for the team and connected systems.) as the shared base, CHF 3'500.– to 5'000.– once, with six months of Business seat (The Business seat is one person’s access to our platform (open alpha); Pro Setup includes three months, and with Operator System it is six per person.) per person; after that CHF 199.– per person per month, or CHF 169.– billed yearly. You keep paying for Copilot as you do today.

The whole system

In the whole system, Microsoft 365 keeps doing what it does well: mail, calendar, files and meetings. We organise the work itself around it. Each person has a vault (The vault is a folder of your working files on your computer; we create it from the vault template.), a folder on their computer with working files and instructions for recurring tasks, organised by PARA (PARA organises storage into four parts: projects, areas, resources and archives.) and readable in Obsidian (Obsidian is a note-taking program that shows a folder of text files on your computer as linked notes.). What the team shares lives in the shared project repository (A Git repository is storage for files that records every change with its date and author; GitHub is a well-known service for it.).

An AI harness (An AI harness is the workspace on your computer in which AI reads files and carries out agreed steps.) works in it; we recommend Claude Code (Claude Code is an AI harness made by Anthropic: it runs on your computer, reads files and carries out steps you describe in plain language.), and the platform is not tied to any one agent. Workflows start with a short command (A command starts a defined workflow. In Pro Setup, we set up three to five commands for your work.), with an email in Outlook or on a schedule, and run on your device, on a computer in the office, on our platform or with a cloud provider (The cloud means computers in a provider’s data centres on which programs run and data is kept, instead of on your own device.), as the quote sets out. AI agents handle parts of the work in sealed-off areas and propose changes, and a person accepts them.

The platform runs on our own infrastructure in Switzerland. We choose the language model (A language model is the actual AI behind an AI assistant: it has learned from a great deal of text and writes an answer to an input.) with you: in the cloud with providers in the US or the EU, or as an open-weight model (An open-weight model is a language model whose weights are freely available, so it can run on your own hardware.) on your own hardware when something should not leave the building. The platform is in open alpha (Open alpha means the platform is at an early stage: we use it ourselves, and it changes all the time.) and we run our own company on it, which is why we set it up with you.

For five people: Operator System plus one Pro Setup (Pro Setup is our recommended package at CHF 1'490.–: vault, workflows with AI agents, first integrations, an introduction session and three months of Business seat.) per person, CHF 10'950.– to 12'450.– once, with 60 days of follow-up support (Follow-up support means that questions and adjustments by email and phone are included for 30 days (Pro Setup) or 60 days (Operator System) after handover.). After that, the Business seats as above and model usage (Model usage means accessing an AI provider’s language model. The cost is not included in the setup price.) with your provider.

Our verdict

Copilot is strong where your work already lives in Microsoft 365. If your team mainly answers mail, summarises meetings and drafts documents, and your permissions are tidy, Copilot Business is the natural choice. Start there; what else your licences already do is the subject of ‘The cheapest solution might already be installed’.

But if the work jumps between Outlook, Bexio and the supplier portal, Copilot helps with the writing and leaves you alone with the carrying over. Then the first way is the smallest step: Copilot stays, and the platform takes over what happens between the systems. The whole system pays off when workflows should run beyond Microsoft and you want to decide where data and models live.