Finding return on investment from Microsoft 365 Copilot to justify full-scale deployment is still “quite challenging”, a Gartner analyst told the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney in May.
“Most” organisations were pausing and “waiting it out” to see “where it makes sense”, Gartner research analyst vice president Dan Wilson said at the Sydney event.
Wilson reported that 40 percent of the 187 IT and CSS leaders who responded to the 2025 Gartner Microsoft 365 and Copilot Survey said their organisations were piloting Microsoft 365 Copilot. A further 19 percent were planning to pilot Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Of those that had finished pilots, five percent said their organisations were moving to larger deployment in 2025.
Nearly half of 127 respondents that had piloted or rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot gave the product a rating of “Some value, shows promise”.
But impact, value and ROI measurements remained elusive, according to Gartner.
“Microsoft's marketing has been brilliant. Execution, not as strong as the marketing, but the marketing is essentially implying that this is just magic, right? You hand it to someone and it just immediately gets them extra productivity, which we all know is definitely not true," Wilson said.
Risk mitigation "significantly greater" than planned
Wilson pointed to risk mitigation as a key challenge, saying the effort required for this was “significantly greater” most organisations deploying Copilot were planning for.
Contributing to this were a range of challenges and risks with Microsoft 365 environments, identified by many survey respondents. These included content sprawl, oversharing and data loss, inadequate Microsoft 365 support or governance functions.
Some organisations were dealing with this by limiting Copilot use to low-risk, trusted users. Many were “just throwing training at the problem”.
“They're trying to help employees catch up on prompting or making sure that they're using the right data to upload, or they're reasoning upon the right data, or … looking at (how to) train them to understand whether the LLM is using old data or inaccurate data,” he said.
He said Copilot deployment plans were often built on the assumption that there is a clean data environment, which is rarely the case and often leads to upgrading to E5 licences, deploying Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management, or looking at third-party tools.
“But all of this, it increases not only the cost of acquiring the licence itself but all the tools and all the staff and all the resources and time and investment,” he explained.
“Ultimately, this all increases total cost of ownership.”
Employees will fight to retain access
Gartner also examined the experience employees have been having with Microsoft 365 Copilot, where and how it was being used and how effective those uses were.
One challenge was getting employees to report on their experiences.
“You can always hold over [them] the threat of removing the licence, and then they will pour their hearts out as to why they need this … they'll fight to try to retain that access,” Wilson said.
A more fundamental challenge is measuring adoption, which, Wilson explained, isn’t as simple as it sounds.
“The default setting within the Microsoft solution for adoption is one use for 28 days,” he said.
“I don’t know about you, but I don't really call that adoption. I would have to say it's probably one use per week, conservatively, but honestly, it probably needs to be one use per day to really be what I would consider to be worth the cost of that licence.”
Wilson suggested that if data was collected about adoption, decisions could then be made about alternatives to buying the full licences to suit specific needs, such as Teams Premium for meeting recaps or the free Copilot chat with Enterprise Data Protection.
Enablement cannot be purely IT department-led
Employee enablement was another key Copilot challenge identified by Wilson - guiding employees on ways that they can adopt or use Copilot to improve their productivity as it rolls out beyond enthusiastic early adopters.
Wilson said despite many people’s expectation that having the tools in hand would suddenly lead them to finding many ways to use them, the reality was different.
“We can't tell them, ‘Here's how to do your job: step one through 28’ when the tools change on a weekly basis,” Wilson told the audience.
“We need to treat them more like teenagers with guardrails and guidance and course correction, instead of this toddler to parent dependency.”
He said Copilot enablement cannot be a purely IT department-led endeavour.
“Organisational development/human resources and IT together have to run this game,” he said.
“It can't be done exclusively by the business, and it can't be done exclusively by IT.”
He said that while IT can collect the data about usage, it’s up to the departments to make decisions about what that data means for the business, and that those departments with high engagement should be prioritised when it comes to deployment.
For now, he said it was vital to remember that Copilot was only two years old and changing rapidly.
“Poor results today could easily become good enough results tomorrow and great results next week, so a continuous evaluation is absolutely essential,” he said.
“We can't stop paying attention to it, and we can't stop leaning into it, because I think if you try to fight it, it's just going to overwhelm you.”
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