'Microsoft Copilot is a gimmick', says top CIO

Issues relate to connectivity and cost

Microsoft Copilot, the AI-powered chatbot embedded into Office 365 and other Microsoft products, is not yet ready for enterprise use, according to a top CIO.

The CIO, who wished to remain anonymous, was talking to Computing recently about their organization's trial of Microsoft Copilot.

"We've started trialing CoPilot and I'm really not impressed," the CIO began. "It's a gimmick, it's not ready," they added.

The CIO said their first experience of attempting to use it was on a flight.

"You have to use the new version of Outlook, which is more web-based. I got on a plane and there's no cached email so I couldn't use it. That was the first mistake.

"Then because everything's online, it sends anything you want to look at to OneDrive. So suddenly you're paying twice for storage. Microsoft isn't stupid. With the size of our company and the volumes of data we have, we get charged millions more for this storage on top of our original Microsoft agreement."

They explained that their enterprise has the top-level Microsoft licensing agreement, E5.

"We pay in the tens of millions of dollars per year for this. We'll have to add another 50% to that if we give everyone Copilot. And Microsoft will try to take us there. They'll say we need an E6 license so you can record Teams meetings and we'll be dragged into Copilot for everyone.

"We're just not seeing the benefits of Copilot at the moment."

A big part of the problem is those storage costs.

"For me, it's not giving us extra productivity and it's not saving time. It only works on data you've got stored in its ecosystem. If you look at our current private cloud, we're paying about three pence per gigabyte of storage. Put that into Microsoft and it goes up to 14 pence per gigabyte.

"And then you've got to pay even more because in my private cloud that includes disaster recovery and incremental backups, but with Microsoft all that's extra expense."

We reached out to Microsoft around this story, but the company declined to comment.

This article originally appeared on our sister site Computing.