Setup is covered on the Copilot page. This post is about what happens after: how Copilot behaves once Exact Online is attached, and the two things to know before you rely on it.
Where does Copilot stand out?
Copilot lives in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. That makes it strong on exactly one point: the moment you need administration data while you are making something else. A quotation in Word with the right customer prices in it. Replying to an email in Outlook with current order status. An overview in Excel you then just carry on calculating with.
For organisations already running fully on Microsoft 365, that is the difference between an assistant you go and get and an assistant that is already there.
Two things to know up front
Copilot Studio has a tool limit. If you build the integration through Copilot Studio you cannot expose every tool at once. Pick the tools that match what this particular team does: orders and customers for the sales department, invoices and the general ledger for finance. That is a platform constraint, not a Ledger Botje one.
There are two Copilots. Microsoft Copilot (the assistant in Microsoft 365) and Copilot Studio (where you build agents yourself) are different products with a different setup. The installation steps differ; both are on the setup page.
Three questions to start with
- "Which orders for this customer are still open?" — ask it while replying to an email from that customer. That is exactly where the time saving sits.
- "Give revenue per month this year in a table." — paste the result into Excel and carry on with the formulas you already use.
- "What are the customer-specific prices for item A1001?" — useful while drafting a quotation in Word.
What you will run into
Copilot is cautious with long lists. Ask for hundreds of rows and you often get a summary instead of the full set. Narrow by period or customer if you want everything.
Licences determine what is possible. What you can actually do depends on your Microsoft 365 licence and on what your administrator has released. If something the documentation says should work does not, check the licence level first.
Name your administration. With several administrations, Copilot does not know which one you mean.
Where to go next
More examples are in the prompt library. Torn between Copilot and the built-in Exact assistant? The comparison helps.
What a team actually does with it
The gain with Copilot rarely sits in a spectacular use case. It sits in small interruptions disappearing. A salesperson answering an email no longer has to open a second screen to check whether the order has shipped. A project lead writing a progress update has the booked hours to hand.
Add that up across a week and it is dozens of small interruptions that no longer happen. Less visible than an automated order flow, but it touches more people.
Start with one bounded team
Do not roll the integration out across the whole organisation at once. Pick a team with a recognisable question - the inside sales desk looking up order statuses all day, for instance - and shape the tool selection around it. That works better for two reasons.
First, in Copilot Studio you then stay comfortably inside the tool limit. Second, a small team teaches you far faster which questions actually get asked, and that determines which tools you enable for the next department. A broad rollout with everything switched on usually produces an assistant that does everything a bit and nothing well.