In this post, I am going to show you what you actually get on Copilot Chat (Basic) – the tier you have without buying a Microsoft 365 Copilot license – and exactly where it stops.
I went looking because I wanted to build an agent over some SharePoint documents and could not. Everything below is from my own tenant, on an account with no Copilot license.
Where to check what tier you are on
Open Copilot Chat and look at the bottom left, under your name. Mine says Copilot Chat (Basic).
Worth checking before you conclude anything is broken. A lot of “Copilot cannot see my files” questions are this, and the interface does not otherwise tell you.
What works
Chat itself. Full conversational Copilot, grounded on the web.
Creating documents, charts and code. Agent Builder shows Word, Excel and PowerPoint capabilities enabled by default, alongside image generation.
Prompt Lab, behind the … at the end of the suggestion chips under the message box.
Organization prompts. This one surprised me, and it is the most useful thing in this post.
Prompts published by an admin in the Microsoft 365 admin center appear in Prompt Lab on a Basic account, labelled Promoted by your organization. I had assumed they were a licensed feature. They are not.
So if you are rolling out Copilot to a mixed estate where some people are licensed and some are not, your published prompts still reach everybody. That is a genuinely useful thing to know before you decide who needs a license.
Where it stops – work data
Basic cannot see your Microsoft 365 content. Not SharePoint, not OneDrive, not email.
I put four invented policy documents into a SharePoint library, waited for them to index, and asked a question whose answer is in one of them:
What is the accommodation limit in London?The document says 180 pounds. What I got back was a request to clarify, followed by an explanation of Airbnb short-let limits, employer allowances in general, university accommodation and Local Housing Allowance.
All from the web. It never touched the document. It did not say it could not reach my files – it simply answered a different question well.
That is the thing to watch for. It does not fail visibly. It gives you a competent, confident, entirely irrelevant answer, and if you did not know your file was there you would not necessarily notice.
Where it stops – agents
You can open Agent Builder from New agent in the left navigation. The configuration screen is all there – instructions, capabilities, suggested prompts.
Then look at the Knowledge section. On Basic it offers exactly three things:
- Add specific websites
- Search all websites
- Only use specified sources
That is the entire list. There is no SharePoint option, no OneDrive, no Teams, no email. The picker does not appear greyed out with an upgrade prompt beside it. It is simply not there.
So an agent on Basic is a web agent. You can point it at documentation sites and it will answer from them. You cannot point it at your own content, which for most internal use cases is the entire reason you wanted an agent.
I have not tested whether the Create button completes, or whether website grounding actually works once an agent exists. I will update this when I have. What I can say for certain is what the Knowledge section offers, because that is the wall you hit first.
What this means if you are deciding on licenses
The split is cleaner than the marketing suggests. Basic gives you a good general assistant. A license gives you an assistant that knows about your organization.
Which means the question is not “who wants Copilot”, it is who needs it grounded on our own content. Somebody drafting emails and summarizing pasted text is well served by Basic. Somebody asking “what did we agree with this supplier” is not, and no amount of prompt engineering closes that gap.
Two practical consequences:
Publish your organization prompts regardless of licensing. They reach everyone, so they are the cheapest thing you can do to make Copilot useful across the whole organization.
Expect the confident wrong answer. The failure mode on Basic is not an error message, it is a plausible answer from the open web. If you are running a pilot with a mix of licensed and unlicensed users, they are not having the same experience, and the unlicensed ones may not realize it.
A note on names, because they keep changing. What my tenant calls Copilot Chat (Basic) has been through several names, and Microsoft’s own documentation does not always use the one your interface shows. Go by what is printed under your account, not by what a comparison table calls it ?