Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is powered by GPT-4o and sits in a strange position in the AI market: it's both one of the most accessible and one of the most underused AI tools available. The free version at copilot.microsoft.com gives you GPT-4o access, web search grounding and DALL-E 3 image generation without paying anything — which makes it a genuinely better free option than the ChatGPT free tier, which was still on GPT-4o mini at the time of review. It's also baked into Windows 11 via the taskbar, which means it's already there for hundreds of millions of users who haven't consciously chosen an AI tool yet.

Where it earns its keep is in the Microsoft 365 context. Copilot Pro at $20/mo unlocks AI inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook — you can ask Excel to analyse a dataset and produce a chart, ask Word to rewrite a section in a more formal tone, or ask Teams to summarise a meeting you missed. That integration is deeper than what any third-party tool can offer because it reads your actual files and calendar. The honest caveat is that it's less customisable than ChatGPT or Claude — there's no system prompt, no persistent memory you control, and the interface is more locked-down. If you live in Microsoft 365, Copilot Pro is an easy add-on. If you don't, ChatGPT Plus is a better standalone choice.