By Jordi Daniels, founder of AI Board · ·
Microsoft 365 Copilot costs $30.00 per user per month on annual billing (€26.00 in the Netherlands), as an add-on to your Microsoft 365 licence. Copilot Business, for smaller organisations, is a promotional $18.00 (€15.60) until 31 December 2026, first year only; regular price $21.00 (€18.20). Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost, but does not read your company data by itself. Sources: microsoft.com, enterprise prices in the US and the Netherlands, Copilot Business prices in the US and the Netherlands, checked 25 September 2026.
Do you need it? Yes, if your knowledge lives in the Microsoft tenant and your permissions are clean. No, if the bottleneck is one executive's decision quality and the material that matters lives outside it.
Choosing between ChatGPT, Claude and a local model? Read ChatGPT, Claude or local: what fits your business, or Claude for business specifically.
AI Board is our product. That is why every Copilot claim below links to Microsoft's own pages, and why there is a section telling you when Copilot is the better buy. If you are already on the Microsoft stack, "why not just use Copilot?" deserves a straight answer rather than a sales one.
What does Copilot cost per user?
Start with the facts, from Microsoft.
Price. Microsoft 365 Copilot is $30.00 per user per month, paid yearly, and it is an add-on: a separate licence for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan is required. For organisations up to 300 seats there is a smaller tier, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, at $18.00 per user per month on annual billing as a promotional price, regularly $21.00; Microsoft's footnote says the promotion runs from 1 July to 31 December 2026 and applies to the first year only. There are also bundles for up to 300 users, such as Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 per user per month, paid yearly (€20.36 in the Netherlands). Below all of that sits Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which Microsoft includes at no additional cost for users with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. The Microsoft prices in this article were checked on 25 September 2026.
What it does in the apps. Per Microsoft Learn: Word drafts, rewrites and summarises documents; Excel analyses data, generates insights, formulas and visuals; PowerPoint builds and edits presentations from prompts or existing content; Outlook drafts emails, summarises threads and coaches tone; Teams summarises and transcribes meetings and captures action items; OneNote drafts plans and lists.
Free Copilot Chat or paid?
Where the grounding line sits. This is the detail most comparisons miss. The included Copilot Chat tier and the unlicensed in-app tier are grounded in web data, and Microsoft is explicit that they "can't use organizational data via Microsoft Graph" unless you upload the file, work with open content in Teams or Outlook, or pay per use for an agent. The paid add-on is what turns on automatic grounding in your emails, files, meetings and calendars through Microsoft Graph and Work IQ, plus Copilot Search and semantic indexing. If someone tells you the free Copilot already reads your whole tenant, they are wrong.
The data boundary. Microsoft states that "prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs", that Copilot "only surfaces organizational data to which individual users have at least view permissions," and that for EU users, EU traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary. The same page notes one honest exception worth knowing: models provided by Anthropic as a subprocessor are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary.
One naming note so you are not confused in your admin centre: Microsoft has renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot to Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to Microsoft Copilot Chat, with older names still appearing during the transition.
That is a serious, well-governed product. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
A Copilot alternative for working locally
AI Board is not an in-app assistant and does not try to be one. It is a personal AI assistant that gets installed on your own laptop, in person, during an on-site setup day, and it is pointed at a knowledge base you own: an Obsidian vault of plain markdown files sitting on your machine. It reads your PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX files and your OneDrive documents. It turns meeting transcripts, including the ones Teams and Copilot produce, into decisions and actions. It pulls live numbers from the connectors that exist today: Google Search Console, PostHog, Metricool, Meta Ads, Google Ads and Stripe.
Two editions, described honestly. In the Claude edition the vault stays on your laptop and processing runs via Anthropic. In the local edition nothing leaves the machine, with a real capability trade-off: local models are weaker than frontier cloud models, and you feel it on hard reasoning. Per question, you choose which one answers.
And it drafts. It does not send. Nothing leaves your name without you pressing the button.
We connect your mail and calendar too. That happens on the setup day, through Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, with your admin's consent.
Side by side
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | AI Board | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | Inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot Chat | On one executive's own laptop, as a personal assistant |
| Whose data it sees | Your Microsoft 365 tenant via Microsoft Graph, scoped to what that user already has permission to view | A knowledge base you own: markdown vault, PDF/DOCX/PPTX/XLSX, OneDrive documents, meeting transcripts, your mail and calendar, plus live connectors (Search Console, PostHog, Metricool, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Stripe) |
| How it learns your business | Automatically, from tenant activity: mail, files, meetings, calendars, org relationships | Deliberately, by what you put in the vault. It gets sharper as you feed it, and stays wrong if you don't |
| Privacy model | Enterprise Data Protection; prompts, responses and Graph data are not used to train foundation LLMs; EU traffic stays in the EU Data Boundary (Anthropic subprocessor models currently excluded) | Vault on your machine. Claude edition: processing via Anthropic. Local edition: nothing leaves the laptop, with a capability trade-off. We make no EU-hosting or certification claims |
| Setup | Licence assignment in the admin centre, then tenant hygiene: permissions, oversharing cleanup, adoption | A setup day, in person, on your machine, tuned to how you actually work |
| Microsoft integration | Native, it is Microsoft | Mail and calendar connected through Microsoft 365 (or Google Workspace), plus OneDrive documents and Teams meeting transcripts |
| Price | Public list price: $30 per user/month, paid yearly, add-on to a qualifying M365 plan | Pricing discussed in a call; no per-seat price, because it is one person's assistant. For the Claude edition you take out your own Claude subscription with Anthropic |
Do you need Copilot? Often, yes
For a lot of companies, most of the time. Be honest about that.
Buy Copilot, and probably not us, if the job is in-app assistance across the workforce. If forty people need faster email, cleaner decks, quicker spreadsheet work and meeting recaps that appear on their own, Copilot is built exactly for that. Per-seat software everyone touches beats a personal setup one person touches.
Buy Copilot if your knowledge genuinely lives in the tenant and the permissions are clean. Its whole advantage is automatic grounding in the mail, files and meetings already sitting in Microsoft 365. If that is where the truth of your company is, Copilot reaches it with no curation work from you.
Buy Copilot if you need procurement-grade governance: Purview retention and eDiscovery over prompts and responses, admin controls, published compliance offerings and the EU Data Boundary commitment. If your legal team wants a named framework in the contract, Microsoft has one and we do not pretend to match it.
Buy Copilot if you want one per-seat licence in one budget line rolled out across the company. AI Board does not charge per seat: it is one person's assistant.
A per-seat licence can also be ChatGPT or Claude. That trade-off is in ChatGPT, Claude or local: what fits your business.
When AI Board fits better than Copilot
Different job, different shape.
AI Board fits when the problem is one person's decision quality, not the workforce's typing speed. A CEO preparing for a board meeting is not trying to write faster. They are trying to walk in already knowing what changed and why, across sources that do not live in one system.
It fits when the material that matters is not in the tenant: strategy notes, competitor research, investor updates, personal thinking, plus the numbers in Stripe, Google Ads and Search Console. A tenant-grounded assistant cannot reason across sources it cannot reach.
It fits when you want the assistant tuned to you personally. A setup day means the vault structure, the recurring questions and the routines are built around your actual week, not a default rolled out to everyone. For what that looks like for a business owner running three companies side by side, read Teus Louwerens' customer story.
It fits when you want the choice per question. Sensitive question, local model, nothing leaves the machine. Hard question, cloud model, better reasoning. Copilot's model selector is real, but it chooses between Microsoft-brokered models, not between the cloud and your own hardware.
Many executives should have both. Copilot writes the meeting transcript. AI Board turns it into the decisions, the follow-ups and the pattern across the last six meetings. That is a handoff, not a fight, and it is what a second brain for executives looks like.
The honest limitations of AI Board
Read these before you talk to us, not after.
Not an in-app assistant. It is not a button in Word, Excel or Outlook. You work next to those apps, on your own laptop.
It is one person's assistant. It does not roll out to forty seats and it does not make your organisation AI-native. It makes one executive AI-native, which is a smaller and more achievable claim.
It needs feeding. Copilot grounds itself automatically from tenant activity. AI Board is grounded in a vault, and a thin vault gives thin answers. The setup day gets you started; the habit keeps it useful.
The local edition is genuinely weaker. Privacy at that setting costs you reasoning quality. We would rather say so than let you find out in month two.
We make no EU-hosting or certification claims. Microsoft publishes theirs. We have no equivalent to point at and will not imply one.
In the Claude edition, processing leaves the machine. The vault stays local; the question and the retrieved context go to Anthropic. "Everything stays on your laptop" is true of the local edition only, and we will not say it about the other one.
FAQ
Is AI Board a replacement for Microsoft 365 Copilot?
No, and it is not priced or built as one. Copilot is per-seat in-app assistance across your workforce inside Microsoft 365. AI Board is one executive's personal assistant on their own laptop, grounded in their own knowledge base and outside connectors.
If you can fund only one and your bottleneck is company-wide productivity, pick a per-seat licence: Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude. The trade-off is in ChatGPT, Claude or local.
How much does Microsoft 365 Copilot cost?
Microsoft lists the enterprise add-on at $30.00 per user per month, paid yearly, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence. For organisations up to 300 users there is Microsoft 365 Copilot Business at a promotional $18.00 per user per month annually, regularly $21.00, with the promotion running until 31 December 2026 and for the first year only, according to Microsoft (checked 25 September 2026). Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is included at no additional cost with eligible subscriptions, but without automatic Microsoft Graph grounding.
Does Microsoft 365 Copilot train on our company data?
Microsoft states that "prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs", that Copilot only surfaces data a user already has at least view permissions for, and that EU traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary, with Anthropic subprocessor models currently excluded from that boundary. This is one of the strongest parts of the Copilot proposition and we will not muddy it.
Can we use both Copilot and AI Board?
Yes, and it is the common case. Copilot handles the in-app work and produces the meeting transcripts. AI Board takes those transcripts, your own documents and your numbers, and turns them into what one leader needs before a decision. See what happens when your own data sits behind it.
For a team-wide assistant, compare ChatGPT, Claude and local models first. For one leader who walks into every meeting prepared, look at the setup day. What that looks like for your company is something we discuss in a call.
AI Board is your personal AI assistant that makes you AI-native: it runs on your own laptop, grounded in your company's data, and gets sharper as your knowledge grows. Private by design, reasoning at CEO, CFO and CTO level, so you ride the AI wave instead of swimming behind it.