If you’ve spent any time in the Microsoft ecosystem lately, you’ve probably noticed something: Copilot is everywhere. It’s in your inbox. It’s in your browser. It’s on your taskbar. It’s whispering to you from inside Excel. Every time you turn around, Microsoft has launched another one.

I get the question a lot: “Lyndsey, which Copilot do I use, and when?”

The short answer is that Copilot is a family of AI experiences, each tuned for a different job. Once you understand the lineup, picking the right one becomes second nature. So, let’s walk through it together.

The Two Major Categories

Before we get into specific tools, it helps to know there are really two flavors of Copilot:

1. Free Copilot (consumer + entry-level work): Anyone with a Microsoft account can use it. Great for everyday questions, drafting, and research.
2. Microsoft 365 Copilot (paid, enterprise): This is the one that’s grounded in your work data. It can read your emails, summarize your meetings, pull from your SharePoint files, and respect your organization’s permissions. This is where the real productivity magic happens.

Keep that distinction in mind as we talk about where you’ll see Copilot appear across the Microsoft stack.

Copilot on the Web (copilot.microsoft.com)

What it is: The public-facing Copilot you can use in any browser, even without signing into work.

When to use it: Quick research, brainstorming, writing help, image generation, casual questions. Think of it as your always-on thinking partner when you need general info that’s not specific to your job.

Note: It does not see your work data. When it comes to the conversations and retrieval, everything stays on the open web.

Copilot Chat (the work version)

What it is: The chat experience you get when you sign in with your work account at microsoft365.copilot.com or inside the Microsoft 365 app. This is also where you’ll find newer collaboration surfaces like Copilot Pages which is a shareable, AI-editable canvas, and Copilot Notebooks, a persistent workspace where you can bundle files, chats, and notes for an ongoing project.

When to use it: When you want a private, enterprise-protected chat for sensitive information. It’ll draft communications, summarize documents you paste in, and get you unstuck on a task. With a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, it also reaches into your tenant data like emails, files, chats, and meetings to understand more context about your work and job.

Note: This will look nearly identical to web Copilot, but this has enterprise data protection and, if licensed, access to your work content for a context boost.

Copilot on the Desktop (Windows)

How to access: The Copilot key on your keyboard and the Copilot pinned app sitting on your Windows taskbar.

When to use it: When you want quick AI help while jumping between apps. Ask it to summarize what’s on your screen, change a Windows setting, draft a quick note, or kick off a task without breaking your flow.

Note: It lives at the operating system level, so it can interact with Windows itself not just one app.

Copilot in Teams

Where to find it in Teams: Copilot built into chats, channels, and meetings.

When to use it: Before, during, or after a meeting, you can get insight into what happened, who said what, and any action items that need to be taken. If you access this after a meeting, you get a clean recap of everything discussed. This is a lifesaver in a lot of cases if you missed out on a key detail or a portion of the meeting.

Teams isn’t just about meetings, when it comes to your chats or channel contributions, you can catch up on threads or messages while you were away.

Note: This one understands conversation. It’s the best Copilot for meetings, transcripts, and team chatter.

Copilot in Outlook

Where to find it: Usually in the top right corner of Outlook as well as integrations throughout the email composition screen.

When to use it: Drafting emails, summarizing long threads, adjusting tone like making an email more direct, or catching up on what you missed overnight. It’s great if you’re struggling to find a way to phrase important information.

Note: It knows email etiquette. It’s tuned for correspondence, not generic or conversational prose so it tends to produce replies that actually sound like they belong in a business inbox. It can across very formal, so know your audience and tweak the outputs as needed.

Copilot in Word

Where to find it: There is a Copilot summary at the top of a document as well as a Copilot button in the bottom right near the scroll bar.

When to use it: Drafting first versions of long-form content, rewriting sections in a different tone, summarizing a 40-page report into something readable, or grounding a draft in another file you point it to.

Note: It’s built for writing and does a good job with tasks with a specific formula or format: proposals, reports, memos, blog posts (hi, that’s this one). You can ask it to use a specific document as source material, which is huge for keeping facts straight.

Copilot in PowerPoint

Where to find it: The “design suggestion” pane on the Home ribbon, the bottom right-hand side of the screen near the zoom controls.

When to use it: Generating a starter deck from a Word doc or a text prompt, redesigning slides that look tired, adding speaker notes, or summarizing an existing deck so you know what you’re walking into.

Note: It thinks visually. You’ll be generating slides with layout, imagery, and structure.

Copilot in Excel

Where to find it: The bottom right-hand corner of the spreadsheet near the scroll bars.

When to use it: Analyzing data without writing formulas, surfacing trends, suggesting charts, building formulas you’d otherwise Google for twenty minutes, or asking plain-English questions of a table. You don’t need to be a pivot table wizard anymore since Copilot can do a lot of computational heavy lifting.

Note: This is the one that often turns a non-analyst into an analyst. Just point it at data and ask what you want to know. A lot of tedious Excel tasks are now boiled down to a prompt, saving you massive amounts of time.

Researcher (and other “reasoning” agents)

What it is: A specialized agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot designed for deep, multi-step research. If you’re unfamiliar with an agent, think of it as a Copilot that can execute on tasks. Since this is a research agent, it pulls from both your work data and the web, fact-checks, and produces an output with sources.

When to use it: Competitive analysis, market scans, technical deep-dives, anything where you’d normally spend an afternoon with twenty tabs open.

The key difference: Researcher takes longer than a regular chat because it’s following a set of steps that resembles “thinking.” It plans, retrieves, verifies, and synthesizes. Use it when the quality of the answer matters more than the speed when tackling a larger project.

Copilot Cowork

What it is: A newer, agent-based experience designed for multi-step work. It won’t just answer the question, but actually do the task using Microsoft products. It can send the email in Outlook, build the deck in PowerPoint, schedule the meeting, and chase down the file in SharePoint, all from a single ask.

When to use it: When you’d otherwise have to switch between five apps to get something done. Cowork strings the actions together for you.

Note: It’s less of a chatbot and more of a coworker. If you give it a goal, it’ll work to accomplish the steps required to complete it. It may ask your input at stages and, like Researcher, takes longer to run than a traditional Copilot chat. However, compared to doing the task solo, the work gets done faster overall.

GitHub Copilot

What it is: The original Copilot released in GitHub back in 2021. It’s an AI pair-programmer for developers, living inside Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and GitHub itself.

When to use it: Writing code, explaining unfamiliar code, generating tests, fixing bugs, or asking questions about a repository. It’s also expanded well beyond autocomplete. There is a chat experience, code review, and agents that can take on whole tasks.

Note: This Copilot is purpose-built for code, not general tasks.

Copilot Studio

What it is: The platform where you build your own Copilots and AI agents. These are low-code custom assistants tuned to your business, your data, and your workflows based on your development and tuning.

When to use it: When out-of-the-box Copilots or agents don’t quite fit. Maybe you want an agent that knows your incentives program inside and out, or one that handles a specific customer-service workflow, or one that lives in Teams and answers HR policy questions. Copilot Studio is where those special use-cases get built and refined.

The key difference: Every other Copilot in this post is something Microsoft built for you. Copilot Studio is the one you use to build Copilots for everyone else at your organization. You define the parameters, the LLM model to use, and any type of knowledge base you want to use as a source. For partners, this is huge because it allows you to capture institutional knowledge or first party sources not found anywhere else and deploy it company-wide.

Role-Specific Copilots (Sales, Service, Finance, Security)

Microsoft has also built role-specific Copilots for the people who live in particular workflows all day:

Copilot for Sales

This plugs into Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. It preps you for customer calls, drafts follow-up emails with CRM context baked in, and surfaces opportunities you might’ve missed.

Copilot for Service

This Copilot lives where customer service agents work and help at drafting responses, pulling from knowledge articles, and summarizing case histories so reps can move faster.

Copilot for Finance

This Copilot sits inside Excel and finance workflows by running variance analysis, reconciling data, and handling the kind of finance-specific math that generic Copilot doesn’t do well out of the box.

Security Copilot

SOC analysts and IT security teams use this Copilot. It investigates incidents, explains threats in plain language, and drafts the kind of post-incident reports that usually eat up half a day, solving all that in a fraction of the time.

Copilot Inside (Almost) Every Other Microsoft App

The list keeps going, because Microsoft has been busy adding Copilot into other productivity software. Here’s some quick hits on the ones I haven’t covered yet:

• Copilot in OneNote: Summarizes pages, turns messy notes into clear plans.
• Copilot in Loop: AI editing inside Loop components for real-time collaboration.
• Copilot in Whiteboard: Generates and organizes ideas, sticky notes, and visuals during brainstorms.
• Copilot in SharePoint: Builds entire sites and pages from a prompt.
• Copilot in OneDrive: Summarizes and compares files without you having to open them.
• Copilot in Planner: Generates plans and suggests tasks based on a goal.
• Copilot in Forms: Drafts surveys and forms from a description.
• Copilot in Stream: Summarizes videos, jumps you to the moments that matter.
• Copilot in Power BI: Generates reports, explains data, and answers questions about your dashboards.

Use the Right Copilot for the Right Task

If there’s a Microsoft app you spend a lot of time in, there’s probably a Copilot already inside it or will be soon. There are benefits of using Copilot in your favorite productivity software as opposed to generalist LLMs that might not connect inside the apps you are running. Once you start treating Copilot as a team of specialists and not a generic magic wand, you’ll find time savings in a lot of different areas.