Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
A lot of businesses — especially the “blue collar,” non-tech ones — are locked into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem these days, and the free Copilot access that comes bundled with a business 365 plan gets pitched as your AI assistant for everything. So I thought it’d be useful to write up what actually happened when I put it up against Claude on the exact same task, back to back, this week.
A bit of context, minus the name: I work for a proper blue-chip. Genuinely massive — the kind of company most people would recognise instantly, with a household name and decades of history behind it. Not a scrappy small business dipping a toe into AI for the first time. And I’ve been there the better part of three decades myself, so this isn’t a fresh-eyed junior having a moan on their first week — this is a long-service one.
The task couldn’t have been simpler. I had two tabs in a spreadsheet: one with a list of employees by first name and surname, and another with the same names alongside their Employee ID. I just wanted a lookup formula that would match the name across to the ID and drop it into a new column on the first tab. I’ve been writing Excel formulas for decades — this is the kind of thing an XLOOKUP handles in one line — and honestly I only reached for AI because I figured it’d save me a couple of minutes over doing it myself. (Small confession: I hadn’t actually clocked that XLOOKUP had quietly taken over from VLOOKUP as the modern way to do this. Decades of muscle memory and I still learned something.)
A quick disclaimer before I go on
Worth being upfront about how I handled this one. I judged this particular spreadsheet — just names paired with employee ID numbers — as low enough risk to test with AI. But I was still deliberate about it: Claude was never given access to any company file, folder, or network. I moved the spreadsheet onto a memory stick, carried it over to my own personal computer, and uploaded it directly into my personal Claude Pro account from there — no live connection to anything company-side. That’s an important distinction. This isn’t “company data is fine on a personal AI account” — it’s an example of making a considered call on a low-risk file and handling the transfer carefully, rather than plugging AI straight into company systems. If you’re weighing something similar, that’s still worth a conversation with IT first.
What happened on free corporate Copilot
This is the free access to Copilot that comes bundled with a business 365 subscription — not the paid personal or enterprise tiers, just whatever got switched on by default. You’d think a company this size would have splashed out for the good stuff. Reader, they did not. My take after this week: it’s fine, maybe even genuinely useful, for things like tightening up an email or tidying a document. Ask it to help with real spreadsheet logic, though, and it’s a different story entirely.
I asked it to sort out the lookup formula. Instead of a one-line fix, it went away and, apparently, had a small breakdown:
- Ballooned the file from 40KB to 21GB, and froze completely.
- Generated 20 separate files in the process of trying to solve a one-formula problem.
- Produced an “executive summary” — presumably meant to give management a clean overview — that didn’t actually contain any real analysis or figures. Just words where numbers should have been.
Two hours later, I still didn’t have a working lookup. I did, however, have a folder that looked like a crime scene.
What happened on Claude
Same task, same data shape, but this time in a normal Claude chat — not even Cowork, just the standard chat window, personal account, no company network or folder access involved. Five minutes, start to finish: upload the spreadsheet, explain in plain English what I wanted, get back a working XLOOKUP formula, download the result, and pop it back onto the memory stick to carry over to my work PC. That’s the whole round trip. Match on first name and surname, pull back the Employee ID, drop it in the right column — done. No bloat, no runaway file size, no 20 mystery files to clean up afterwards, and I picked up the modern way to do it in the process.
The bit that actually gets me
It’s not really about one bad formula, in the end. It’s that at a company this size, AI access currently looks like: a bare-bones free Copilot tier switched on for everyone by default, a page on SharePoint you might stumble across if you go looking (I did, because I’m nosy like that), and — allegedly — a “better” tier that exists somewhere behind a request process with enough hoops in it to make you wonder if it’s worth the bother. No rollout plan I’ve ever seen. No training. No “here’s what this is actually good for, here’s what it isn’t.” Just dropped in and left to sort itself out.
Maybe it’s different in other corners of the business — I can only tell you what’s landed on my desk. But I’ve got real hands-on skill with this stuff, and if I’m hitting walls this obvious, I do wonder how everyone else is getting on with it. For a company this size, this really shouldn’t be this half-baked.
To be fair, it’s still early days for a lot of companies working out what “AI access” actually means for their employees. Businesses clearly know they need to get to grips with it — you can’t avoid the conversation right now — and I’d bet some of them have sat down and actually worked out a proper plan. Mine, evidently, has not. There’s a bit of irony in that too: you’d think the bigger the company, the more resource behind getting this right, but from where I’m sitting it seems to run the other way — the bigger they are, the less personal the thinking feels. Sign of the times, maybe.
I probably notice it more than most, because I run a small web and WordPress side business where I use AI properly, day in and day out. This was actually the first time I’d tried leaning on it for a work task rather than my own — and that contrast made it obvious pretty fast that this wasn’t a considered decision on their part. It was a base package, ticked off a list.
The takeaway
I’m not writing this to say Copilot is bad — free access to something is still better than nothing for a lot of businesses that would otherwise have zero AI tooling. But “free” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that pitch, especially when the company handing it to you could clearly afford better and just… hasn’t bothered. If the free tier that ships with your 365 plan is what your team’s actually been given, it’s worth being realistic about what it’s good for: drafting and polishing text, not untangling data or formulas. Because the two hours I lost weren’t free — they just moved the cost from a subscription line to a working day. My working day, incidentally, on the company dime, which is a special kind of irony.
If your team is leaning on a lookup, a pivot, or anything with real logic behind it, it might be worth testing whichever AI tool you’ve got access to on a task that small before you assume it’ll scale up to the bigger ones. And if you’re the one deciding what “AI access” means for your employees — maybe don’t just dump a SharePoint page and call it a strategy.