Microsoft Copilot and the Price of Time

Microsoft Copilot and the Price of Time

Why €1 a Day is a Bargain for Business

By Brian O'Brien

Time, they say, is money. But in the Irish workplace, time is more than just euros and cents, it’s the frantic heartbeat of daily chaos, the lost hour between Teams meetings and overflowing inboxes, the gap between what we could do and what we actually get done. Now, along comes Microsoft Copilot, a tool wrapped in the familiar packaging of Office, promising to give us back an hour of our day. For €28 a month (roughly a euro a day) it might just be the best investment your company never knew it needed.

Let’s not pretend it doesn’t sound expensive. Thirty dollars, or €28 if you’re paying Microsoft in our own currency per user, per month. That’s a lot more than the free plugins and extensions we’ve all been installing with reckless abandon. It raises eyebrows in finance departments and furrows brows at the IT helpdesk. “Thirty quid? For what? Clippy with a law degree???”

But here’s the thing: Copilot doesn’t just sit there suggesting bullet points or correcting spelling. It does the work. Not all of it, and not perfectly, but enough of the mind-numbing, repetitive drudgery that it earns its keep. And fast.

Across a business, these micro-wins add up. One hour per employee, per day. That’s five hours a week. That’s over three working weeks a year, returned to you like a tax rebate from the gods of productivity.

Picture this: a sales manager logs into her laptop at 8:45am. She’s prepping for a customer meeting, normally a scramble through half a dozen PowerPoint decks, a couple of Excel sheets, and a calendar full of notes. With Copilot, she types: “Summarise key performance trends for Acme Ltd. this quarter and draft slides for my 10am call.” By the time she finishes her coffee, the slides are ready, data pulled in, charts laid out, talking points included. Ten minutes, not ninety.

A finance analyst wants to know how this quarter’s margins compare with last year’s, broken down by region. The usual process involves digging through ERP systems, exporting rows of numbers, massaging them in Excel. With Copilot: “Show margin comparisons by region, Q1 this year vs last, in a chart.” Boom! Done in under five minutes. Less time spent on Ctrl+F, more time on insight.

And let’s talk about the most soul-destroying task in modern business: writing meeting minutes. Copilot listens, transcribes, identifies action points, and even sends the follow-up emails. You go from “Who said they’d follow up with procurement?” to “Here’s your summary and assigned actions, already emailed to the team.”

Across a business, these micro-wins add up. One hour per employee, per day. That’s five hours a week. That’s over three working weeks a year, returned to you like a tax rebate from the gods of productivity. Suddenly, €28 a month looks less like a luxury and more like a steal. What other tool in your tech stack promises you the return of time itself?

Of course, there are caveats. Copilot is only as good as the data you feed it. Garbage in, garbage out still applies. And yes, there’s an upfront cost, not just the license, but the effort to implement it wisely, train staff, and get buy-in from the sceptics (there’s always at least one Kevin from Accounts who refuses to speak to AI on principle).

But the value isn’t just in what Copilot does. It’s in what it frees us to do. It buys back the mental space that lets us think critically, creatively, like actual humans and not spreadsheet-wrangling drones. It lets Irish businesses, so often constrained by legacy systems and under-resourced teams, punch above their weight.

In the great Irish tradition, we might initially scoff. “Sure, I’ve been working fine without it.” But we once said the same about smartphones, sat-navs, and electric kettles. This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about respecting their time.

Microsoft Copilot doesn’t promise magic. But it does offer something more grounded and more valuable: one more hour in your day. For a lot less than the price of a cup of coffee, that’s a bargain even the most hardened cynic might come to admire.

And if it spares us all just a few more minutes from the purgatory of formatting PowerPoint slides, well, that alone might justify the licence.