Your company bought Copilot. Maybe thousands of seats. The rollout email went out, the training link got sent round, and now you're wondering whether any of it landed, especially at the top.
Here's the number that should give you pause. Twenty million people now pay to use Microsoft 365 Copilot at work, up from fifteen million three months earlier. Companies buying more than 50,000 seats at once have quadrupled in a year, according to coverage of Microsoft's Q3 FY2026 earnings call. But only about a third of people who hold a licence actually use it in a given week. Buying the licence is the easy part. Getting people to change how they work is the hard part, and that's what training is for.
What exactly did you buy?
Two different things get called "Copilot," and the difference matters before you train anyone on it. The free version lives in a browser and does general chat and web search. Microsoft 365 Copilot, the paid one, works inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, and it answers using your company's own files, emails and chats rather than the open web, as Microsoft's own support documentation lays out. It runs on top of the Microsoft 365 and Azure setup you already have. It doesn't replace it. The paid version is the one your leadership team is being asked to buy in bulk, and it's the one this article is about.
And it isn't just tech firms buying in. Accenture took over 740,000 licences, its biggest Copilot deal yet. Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes and Roche each have more than 90,000 paid seats. Around 70% of the Fortune 500 now run Copilot in some form. Pharma, professional services, manufacturing, automotive. These aren't early adopters chasing a shiny thing. When a company like that buys in, it's an organisation-wide licence, signed off by the same leadership team that's usually last in the queue for proper training.
Does the training actually matter, or is Copilot obvious enough to figure out?
It matters more than the licence does. A licence changes nothing on its own. Training does, or it should. Among the organisations we train, the pattern is consistent: the people who get a real session, not just a link to a video, are the ones still using Copilot for actual work a month later. Everyone else tries it once, gets a weak answer, and quietly goes back to the old way.
The usage data backs this up. Queries per user have grown nearly 20% quarter over quarter, and weekly engagement is now close to Outlook levels. That kind of growth doesn't happen by luck. It happens in the organisations that treated the rollout as a training problem, not just a licensing one.
What goes wrong when companies roll this out?
The same handful of problems, over and over. Rollouts move faster than any training plan can keep up with. Most people don't know how to write a prompt that gets a useful answer, so their first few tries flop and they give up. Training gets treated as one kickoff webinar instead of something people come back to as their work changes. And nobody's explained clearly what Copilot can see or where a summary might end up, so people either avoid it out of caution or use it more loosely than they should.
We've covered how to handle all this at the workforce level, the labs, the prerequisites, how to tell if it's landing, in our guide to taking Copilot training online. That's the right playbook for a broad rollout. Your leadership team needs something different.
Why can't leaders just take the same training as everyone else?
Because nobody's checking whether they finished it, and that changes everything. There's no manager chasing an executive's completion rate, no review tied to it. So leadership training either lands the first time or it doesn't happen at all. And it matters more than it looks, for three reasons.
Leaders set the tone. If your leadership team mandates a Copilot rollout but never sits through a proper session themselves, that sends a message, whether they mean it to or not. People notice when the folks asking them to change haven't changed anything themselves.
Leaders need straight answers on governance, not a general tour. Where does the data go. What can Copilot see. What happens when it gets something wrong. These are the people accountable for the answer, so rushing past it doesn't work.
Leaders need a room of peers, not their own team. Executives ask sharper questions when the people watching aren't the people they manage. Put them in a session with their direct reports and most of the honest questions never get asked.
On-demand video or instructor-led: which one's right?
For a broad workforce rollout, on-demand video. For executives, instructor-led. They're good at genuinely different things, so it's worth being clear about the trade-off.
On-demand video is cheap to scale and people go at their own pace, which is exactly what you want across hundreds or thousands of staff. Our MS-4004 workforce Copilot training is built for that. The weakness is accountability. Nobody's watching whether it gets finished, and a recorded session tends to get half-watched while someone answers email.
Instructor-led costs more per head and takes a fixed block of everyone's calendar. In exchange, it forces real engagement. Someone asks the governance question out loud. Someone drafts a real email on their own inbox instead of watching a demo. Worth knowing: even Microsoft's own official Copilot training for executives runs on a fictional company rather than a real executive's inbox. A good instructor-led session closes exactly that gap.
So what should you actually do?
For executives, book the instructor-led session. Here's the honest case for it. Copilot has gone from a trial to core infrastructure at a lot of large organisations, which makes a half-hearted rollout to leadership a bigger risk now than it was a year ago, not a smaller one. An unwatched video doesn't fix the accountability gap, doesn't answer the governance questions, and doesn't give leaders the peer-only room they need.
And the real test of whether it worked isn't attendance. It's simpler than that. Are those same leaders still opening Copilot on their own real work a few weeks later, without anyone reminding them?
Our Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Interactive Experience for Executives (MS-4012) course is built for exactly this group, in person or live online, with instructors who tune the session to whatever's actually on your leadership team's plate that quarter. If they bought Copilot alongside everyone else and still haven't had a proper session on it, that's worth sorting before the next renewal.
