Most businesses have formed a view on AI without ever using it inside the tools their staff work in all day. Microsoft has now removed the main reason for that.
Since 1 August 2026, a programme called Copilot in 30 has been available through Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider partners. It gives eligible small and medium businesses a 30 day trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business for up to 25 users, at no cost, with no payment details required and no automatic renewal at the end.
Twenty five licences matters more than it sounds. It is enough to put Copilot in front of finance, admin, sales and management at the same time, rather than handing one licence to one curious person and drawing conclusions from a sample of one.
This post covers what the trial includes, what to check before you switch it on, and how to run 30 days in a way that produces an actual answer rather than a vague impression.
What you get
Copilot is not a separate application. It runs inside the Microsoft 365 apps your team already opens every morning.
- Word: drafts, rewrites and summarises documents, so the blank page problem disappears
- Excel: builds formulas, explains data in plain English and surfaces trends without anyone needing to be the resident spreadsheet expert
- PowerPoint: turns a document or a set of rough notes into a working deck
- Outlook: summarises long threads and drafts replies
- Teams: catches you up on meetings you missed and pulls out decisions and actions
Individually these save minutes. Across a team over a month, they add up.
Microsoft’s own research into early Copilot users found people completed searching, writing and summarising tasks 29% faster, 70% reported being more productive, and 68% said the quality of their work improved. Notably, 77% said that once they had used it, they did not want to give it up.
Treat those figures as directional rather than a forecast for your business. They came from users who had support and structure around the rollout, which is exactly the variable most trials get wrong.
Check these before you switch it on
This is the part that most coverage of the trial skips, and it is the part that decides whether the 30 days go well.
Copilot inherits your existing permissions
Copilot can surface anything a user already has access to. It does not grant new access, but it makes existing access dramatically easier to exercise. If your SharePoint and OneDrive permissions have drifted over the years, and in most tenants they have, Copilot will find the payroll spreadsheet in the wrongly shared folder faster than any member of staff ever would have.
Review sharing links, site permissions and any “anyone with the link” content before day one. Oversharing that has sat harmlessly unnoticed for three years becomes visible the moment you turn on a tool designed to find things.
There is a second, separate trial that is on by default
Alongside the partner-led Copilot in 30 programme, Microsoft also rolled out a self-serve trial that eligible users can start themselves from inside Copilot Chat. It is enabled by default. Unless an administrator turns it off in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, users can activate Copilot access on their own and it will appear in your admin centre as a licence request.
If you want the trial to be a controlled evaluation rather than something that happens to you, check that setting first and decide deliberately.
Confirm your licensing is eligible
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business requires an eligible underlying subscription: Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard or Business Premium. The trial is aimed at organisations with fewer than 300 employees. Worth confirming before anyone gets excited.
Have an AI usage policy, even a short one
Staff will paste things into Copilot. Decide in advance what is acceptable, what client or personal data must not go near it, and who to ask when someone is unsure. One page is enough. Nothing is not.
How to run the 30 days properly
The default failure mode is switching it on, letting people prod at it for a fortnight, and ending up with opinions rather than evidence.
Pick the right 25 people. Not the 25 loudest volunteers. Choose people who spend most of their day inside Microsoft 365 and have identifiable repetitive tasks. A field engineer who barely opens Word will not tell you anything useful.
Decide what success looks like before day one. “Did you like it?” produces nothing you can act on. Pick something measurable: time to produce a monthly report, time spent on inbox triage, turnaround on proposals.
Run it as a habit, not an experiment. The gains come from daily use. A single trial session in week one, then nothing, tells you only that people were busy.
Expect to find that some people do not need it. This is a genuinely useful outcome. Discovering that eight of your 25 get real value and the rest do not is worth more than a blanket yes or no, because it tells you exactly how many licences to buy.
Plan the exit before day 30. Decide in advance who moves to a paid licence. People who have built Copilot into their working day and then lose it abruptly will notice.
Is it worth doing?
If you have been putting off a decision on Copilot because the licence cost is hard to justify without evidence, this removes the obstacle. Thirty days with 25 users and real company data will tell you more than any amount of reading.
The trial itself is free. Getting a clear answer out of it takes some planning, and that is where most of the value sits.
Frequently asked questions
Does the trial renew automatically? No. It ends after 30 days. Nothing is charged and no payment details are required to start.
Can we use it if we already have some Copilot licences? The trial is aimed at organisations new to paid Copilot, so it is a practical way to extend evaluation to more of your team before committing to further licences.
What happens to our data at the end? Content created during the trial stays in your tenant. Users simply lose the Copilot features unless they move to a paid licence.
Do we need to do anything technical to start? Your licensing needs to be eligible and your permissions should be reviewed first. The activation itself is straightforward.
Can staff start a Copilot trial without us knowing? Yes, unless you turn that setting off. The self-serve trial is enabled by default in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
Talk to us about Copilot
We manage Microsoft 365 environments for businesses across the UK, and we look at Copilot the same way we look at anything else that touches company data: what it can reach, who can see what, and whether the tenant is in a fit state for it.
If you want to run the trial as a controlled evaluation rather than an experiment, get in touch and we will help you scope it.