What Leaders Can Do to Prepare for Free Copilot Chat and the New Era of Agents
Microsoft Ignite made one thing clear this week at their annual conference: AI is becoming a normal part of everyday work, not just something big enterprises experiment with. The future is moving toward human-led, agent-supported workplaces where everyone has an AI teammate to help them work smarter.
For small businesses, non-profits, and midmarket teams, the announcements weren’t abstract. They were practical signals that it’s time to start getting ready. And if you’ve been waiting on budget approval, licensing clarity, or the “right moment,” this week’s announcements officially cleared that path.
Copilot Chat will soon be free for all Microsoft 365 subscribers, and the more advanced Copilot Business subscription will be just $21 per user starting in December.
In other words: your employees will soon have these tools in their hands, and preparing them now will pay off.
Below are the five essential steps leaders should take right now.
1. Prepare your environment for Work IQ before your team gets free Copilot Chat
Microsoft introduced Work IQ, a new intelligence layer that learns how your organization actually works — your workflows, your habits, your communication patterns, and the knowledge buried across files, meetings, and emails.
This is the engine that will power Copilot Chat, Office agents, and custom agents moving forward. And with more free Copilot features landing in 2026, that intelligence will matter even more.
The key idea is simple: If Copilot learns from a messy environment, the results will feel messy too.
Now is a great time to:
• Clean up permissions
• Improve data hygiene
• Standardize file and communication practices
• Confirm sensitivity labels and compliance settings are applied
A little prep now makes a huge difference once Copilot becomes available to everyone.
2. Choose one workflow for Office Agents to transform
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents are already rolling out. And with free Copilot Chat coming to every Microsoft 365 app in the next few weeks, your team will be able to use these agents even without paid licenses.
The smartest move you can make is to start small: pick one workflow where an AI teammate could eliminate “blank-page” effort.
Think about things like:
• Reporting
• Proposals
• Planning documents
• Onboarding manuals
One good example is all it takes to show people what’s possible. If you’ve been waiting for licensing to “test Copilot,” that waiting period is officially over. Your teams will be able to experiment, and we are here to help guide that learning if you don’t have an internal champion already assigned.
3. Modernize meeting culture with Teams collaboration agents
Teams is quickly becoming more than a meeting platform. It’s turning into a genuine meeting teammate. If your organization uses Teams, and has a lot of virtual meetings – pay attention here!
New collaboration agents can:
• Run agendas
• Capture notes and decisions
• Assign and track follow-ups
• Pull updates from Planner, SharePoint lists, Dynamics, and other industry tools
Once free Copilot Chat is available in Outlook and Microsoft 365 apps, every user will get access to this type of automation.
For many organizations, this is one of the fastest ways to reclaim time. Let the agent handle the admin — your team can focus on the actual conversation.
At GadellNet, we use Facilitator in the majority of our meetings to do exactly what is described above. It has created better meeting focus, it captures our decisions better and reduces meeting load across our leadership team. It has allowed us to shorten meetings, cancel unproductive ones and shift time to higher-value work.
4. Put a simple governance plan in place before Copilot reaches every user
Because Copilot Chat will be available to almost everyone, it’s important to put some light structure around how your organization uses it.
Leaders will want clarity on:
• Who can create or modify agents
• What data agents are allowed to access
• How behavior, logs, and usage will be monitored
• Where Agent 365 fits into your security model
Agent 365 is the new control plane for agents. It gives you a single place to manage them, set access rules, and see how they’re interacting with people and data.
This doesn’t have to be complicated! We recommend setting plans in place before Copilot becomes widely available.
5. Use this moment to skill your team — before the capabilities land
Ignite highlighted something every leader already feels: the skills gap is now the biggest barrier to responsible AI adoption.
To help, Microsoft launched the AI Skills Navigator, a free, role-based learning platform that gives employees guided learning paths and role-ready credentials.
This matters because IBM found that role-aligned AI training helps people learn skills 43 percent faster than generic training.*
Your team doesn’t need to become data scientists!
They just need:
• Simple, role-based paths
• Clear expectations
• A few small wins to build confidence
• A shared playbook for using Copilot well
If you want people to use free Copilot Chat effectively on Day 1, the training needs to start before rollout — not after. GadellNet has been training users on Copilot features since 2024. We could not be more excited for more of these features to be available to the teams that we support!
Final Thought On Preparing For 2026
If there’s one takeaway from Microsoft Ignite 2025, it’s this: AI is about to become part of everyday work for everyone. With Copilot Chat becoming free and agents showing up across Microsoft 365, this isn’t something only big enterprises need to prepare for anymore. The organizations that take a little time now to clean up their data, choose a few good use cases, and help their teams build confidence will be the ones that get the most value the fastest.
If you want help getting your environment and your people ready, GadellNet can partner with you to build that plan.
