When leaders ask us whether Microsoft Copilot is worth it, they usually expect a sales pitch. Here is the more useful answer: the largest real-world trial ever run gives us an actual number, and you can do the maths yourself.
The trial worth knowing about
The UK Government ran Copilot across roughly 20,000 public servants — one of the biggest workplace AI experiments anywhere. The average time saved came out at 26 minutes per person per day. Not transformation-consultant numbers. Twenty-six ordinary minutes: a faster first draft, a meeting summarised, an inbox triaged, a spreadsheet explained.
What 26 minutes actually means
Twenty-six minutes sounds small until you multiply it. Across a month of working days it is roughly nine hours per person — more than a full working day returned to every staff member, every month. For a 20-person organisation at a typical fully-loaded staff cost, that is real money, and it dwarfs the licence fee.
We have built a free calculator that does this arithmetic for your team size, your wage costs and your likely usage — including the newer Cowork credit costs most calculators ignore. No sign-up, takes about a minute.
The honest caveats
Averages hide variance. In the same trials, people who received guidance and had well-organised data saved far more than 26 minutes; people who were handed a licence and nothing else often saved close to none. The difference was never the technology — it was adoption: a few hours of practical training, sensible file permissions, and two or three workflows deliberately rebuilt around the tool.
That is also why we tell some clients not to buy Copilot yet. If your SharePoint permissions have drifted for years, Copilot will faithfully surface documents nobody was meant to see. Foundations first, licences second.
The question to ask
Not “is Copilot worth $X per month?” but “what would we do with nine hours per person per month, and are we set up to actually collect them?” If you want an honest read on the second half of that question, our free AI Readiness Check takes two minutes — or talk it through with us.
Want this handled properly? Talk to us about AI & Copilot Enablement.
