Bill & Ben vs Microsoft 365 Copilot: Teams colleagues
Microsoft 365 Copilot is built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Bill & Ben is two named AI colleagues in Teams chat and meetings, with Bill planning and Ben building. They overlap in Teams and differ in everything else below.
Last checked
Side by side
| Topic | Bill & Ben | Microsoft 365 Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Where it works | Write to Bill in a Teams chat or say it in a meeting. No new app to learn. | In Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Teams and Forms, and in the Microsoft Copilot app on web, desktop and mobile.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
| Meetings | Ask Bill or Ben to join a Teams meeting. | In Teams meetings it can summarise the discussion, answer questions during or after the meeting and suggest action items. Whether it joins as a separate participant is not stated by Microsoft on that page.Source: support.microsoft.com, read |
| Plans and tasks | Bill turns your idea into a clear plan. Ben does the engineering. | Copilot Cowork carries out tasks across your Microsoft 365 environment on your behalf. It needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium) license and usage-based billing.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
| Where code runs | Ben works in a sealed workspace, runs the tests and opens a draft pull request. | Microsoft Copilot Code helps enterprise users build, understand and automate code, and is in the Frontier preview program. Where the code runs is not stated by Microsoft on that page.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
| What it may access | Bill and Ben can only do what the person asking is allowed to do. | Copilot only accesses data that users are authorized to access.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
| Admin controls | Only people your admin allows. Others get one polite "I can't help with that" a day. | Admins use Copilot controls in the admin center to manage how users create and use agents and whether web search is allowed, and can assign an AI Administrator role.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
| Where data is processed | Our hosting region is not published yet. Coming soon | EU traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary, while worldwide traffic can be sent to the EU and other countries or regions for LLM processing.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
| Model choice | Leading models from several labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. Your admin can switch off any provider. | You can pick a model with the model selector; by default a router chooses. Anthropic models are available only in some licensed experiences and not to all users by default.Source: learn.microsoft.com, read |
When Microsoft 365 Copilot is the better choice
- Your team works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook all day and wants Copilot inside those apps, using your Microsoft 365 data.
- You need a published data-location commitment today. Microsoft states an EU Data Boundary for Copilot. We have not stated our hosting region yet.
Sources
Last checked . Product pages change, so check the vendor before you decide.
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/plan/copilot-overview, read
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-copilot-in-microsoft-teams-meetings-0bf9dd3c-96f7-44e2-8bb8-790bedf066b1, read
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/plan/security-microsoft-copilot, read
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Microsoft and Microsoft 365 Copilot are trademarks of their owners. We use the names only to say which product is meant. Bill & Ben is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
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