Copilot Adoption User Guide
How to use the Copilot Adoption area of the admin site to decide who should keep a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, who should get one, and where to spend your enablement effort.
This is the practical guide. If you want to know why the tool is designed the way it is, or you are adding a feature to it, read Copilot Adoption Tool instead — that page is the specification.
About the screenshots. Every screenshot on this page comes from a demo deployment populated with generated data. The user names, agent names and figures are fictional (Contoso, Fabrikam, Tailspin Toys and similar) — they illustrate the layout, not a real tenant.
Where to find it: the portal splits into Insights and Administration. Copilot Adoption is the third item under Insights.
- What this tool is for
- Before you start
- Your first fifteen minutes
- The tabs
- Three things people actually use it for
- Reading the charts
- The Excel report
- Glossary
- Warnings you might see
- FAQ
Two questions, and deliberately no others:
- Who is paying for a Copilot licence they are not using?
- Who would benefit from a licence they do not have?
Everything on the page serves one of those, or justifies a number that does.
It is not a general Copilot usage report. If you want prompt volumes, key phrases, sentiment or agent chatter for their own sake, that lives in Reports → Copilot.
It does not rank named individuals against each other. Every per-user list exists to judge whether a licence is well placed, which is why the default sort is least-engaged first.
The tool needs data. Check Health if anything looks empty.
| Import | What you lose without it |
|---|---|
| User metadata (licences, department, job title, manager, account status) | Everything. Without licence assignments there is no licensed population and no denominator |
Copilot audit log (Audit.General → Copilot) |
Per-user engagement, unlicensed Copilot Chat use, per-app breakdown, agents, and the weekly trends. This is the important one |
| Microsoft Copilot usage report | A fallback for per-user activity if the audit import is unavailable. Covers licensed users only |
| Microsoft 365 usage reports (Teams / Outlook / SharePoint / OneDrive) | The ability to find heavy Microsoft 365 users who have never had a Copilot licence |
If an import is missing the page still works — it tells you what it could not calculate rather than showing a silently wrong number.
Expect a delay. Copilot events reach the Activity API roughly 2–3 days after they happen, and Microsoft's usage reports are published a few days in arrears. "Yesterday" is never complete.
The first run of each period is slow. The analysis reads a lot of audit history and is then cached, so the first load after choosing a new period takes noticeably longer than the second.
The period selector and the Excel report button sit top right; the six tabs and the headline cards are directly below them, followed by the first section, Where you stand. (The example below is showing a 90-day window.)
- Open Copilot Adoption. Leave the period on Last 28 days — it matches Microsoft's own reporting month, so your numbers will line up with theirs.
- Read the red and amber headline cards. Reclaimable licences is the money. Habitual users is whether the programme is working.
- Look at the two gauges. If adoption is high but habit is low, everybody opened Copilot once and stopped — a very common and very expensive pattern.
- Scroll to the adoption funnel and find the biggest single drop. That is where your effort goes.
- Open the Enablement plan card. It tells you how many people need each kind of intervention.
- Go to Licensed users, sort by Least engaged first, and export the CSV. That is your reclaim conversation.
- Go to Licence opportunities, tick Recommended only, and export. That is your purchase or reallocation case.
Anywhere a number surprises you, click the small ⓘ next to it. It tells you what the number means, how it was calculated, the formula, and which import it came from.
The executive view, in four numbered sections. They follow the order the questions get asked in.
1. Where you stand
- Headline cards — licences, adoption, habit, reclaimable licences, engagement, unlicensed use, recommended candidates.
- Where you stand — the adoption and habit rates as gauges against a judgement scale. The gap between them is the finding: adoption near 100% with a habit rate near zero means everyone opened it once.
- Adoption funnel — licensed → ever used → active → habitual → champion. The narrowing is the point.
2. What to do next
- Enablement plan — how many people need each action. Click any row to jump to the list of exactly those people, ready to filter further or export.
- Adoption by department — worst first. This is your running order.
- Where the unmet demand is — departments you could rebalance licences into rather than buy for.
3. How Copilot is being used
- How often people open Copilot — raw active days a month, no scoring or weighting. Read it against the habit rate above: lots of "Daily" with a low habit rate means people open Copilot constantly and do very little with it.
- Engagement mix and Where Copilot is used — the population split, and which surfaces carry the traffic.
- The shape of adoption — your typical user against your own champions.
- Frequency vs intensity — which departments are frequent-but-shallow and which are deep-but-occasional. The letter inside each bubble is its engagement band, so the chart still reads when printed in black and white.
- Usage concentration — whether adoption is broad or carried by a handful of people.
- Who is doing the Copilot work and What Copilot is working on.
4. Trend and wider reach
- Weekly trends — active users, and interaction volume including unlicensed.
- Licensed and unlicensed side by side — the reallocation view.
- Adoption by country — for organisations that run enablement regionally.
Nothing on the Overview? If the page says "No Copilot licences found", the analysis ran fine and simply found no one holding a Copilot licence. The page lists the three usual causes in the order worth checking — most often the licence import has not completed yet on a new installation.
Everyone holding a Copilot licence, with their engagement score, band, and a recommended action tag.
Filter by band, recommended action, department, Cowork use, or Disabled accounts only — a disabled account still holding a Copilot licence is the easiest reclaim there is. Sorting and filtering happen server-side, and the CSV export is exactly what is on screen.
Arriving here by clicking a row of the enablement plan pre-sets the action filter. It is a normal filter in the toolbar, so you can widen it, narrow it further, or clear it.
People using Copilot Chat with no licence, treated as a population in their own right. Microsoft's own reporting cannot see these people at all. Anyone in the Frequent or Daily tile has built a Copilot habit with no licence, no training and no prompting — the strongest licence case you have.
Two further cards show where that unlicensed demand is coming from — which surfaces it happens on, and which departments it sits in:
Your Copilot agent estate, with a Keep / Review / Retire / New verdict and a stated reason for each.
An agent appears only once it has been used — the audit log records agents that ran, not agents that exist. New agents (first seen recently) are exempt from review on purpose: a brand-new agent with two users has not failed, it has not started.
Three cards frame the estate before you get to the list. Inventory health is the size of the clean-up at a glance — every known agent gets exactly one verdict. Where agent effort goes shows how concentrated agent use is, which is usually a handful of agents carrying almost everything. Agent usage by department attributes that work to the people running it:
The inventory lists every agent seen in the last 120 days, busiest first, and can be filtered by verdict or narrowed to custom agents only:
Unlicensed users ranked by how strong the case for a licence is, each with a written justification you can paste into a request. Unlike the licensed list, the justification genuinely differs per person.
The Justification column sits off the right-hand edge. This table is wider than the panel holding it, so at a typical window width the justification is only reachable by scrolling the table sideways — and it is squeezed into a narrow column when you get there, which is what makes the rows so tall. It is written out in full in the Export CSV and in the Excel report, so exporting is usually the faster way to read it.
Every formula, with worked examples and the full list of SKUs that were and were not counted as Copilot licences. Send sceptics here.
Each method is its own expandable section. Below, How the engagement score is calculated is expanded to show the weightings, the formula and a worked example:
- Set the period to Last 90 days — a longer window is fairer before taking a licence away.
- Note Reclaimable licences on the Overview.
- Licensed users → filter band Never used → export. These have produced nothing; confirm the licence is needed.
- Filter band Dormant → export. These tried Copilot and stopped — worth a conversation before you reclaim.
- Tick Disabled accounts only → export. Reclaim these immediately.
- Cross-check the Licensed and unlicensed side by side table. A department with idle licences and heavy unlicensed use is a reallocation, not a purchase.
- Adoption funnel → find the biggest drop. That tells you the kind of problem.
- Enablement plan → the size of each job.
- The shape of adoption → whether your typical user differs from your champions on frequency, depth or breadth. If they match on frequency but not breadth, more "use Copilot more often" training is wasted effort — they already do, just in one place.
- Adoption by department, worst first, is your running order.
- Frequency vs intensity → frequent but shallow departments need richer scenarios; deep but occasional ones need a reason to come back tomorrow.
- Usage concentration → if the top decile does most of it, your programme is propped up by enthusiasts and will collapse when they change team.
- Before you start, download the Excel report and keep it.
- Run your programme.
- Download it again with the same period length.
- Compare. The Report sheet in each file records the period and every threshold used, so you can prove the two are comparable.
Check the thresholds match. The tuning is adjustable. If someone changed a band boundary between the two runs, "adoption went up" might just mean the bar moved. Both files record what they used.
| Chart | Read it as | Common misreading |
|---|---|---|
| Gauges | The rate against a judgement scale | The bands are deliberately stepped, not a gradient — 41% and 43% are the same verdict |
| Funnel | Each stage is a subset of the one above. The % is conversion from the stage immediately above, not from the top | A healthy 90% following a terrible 40% is still a good step |
| Habit tiles | Of the people who use Copilot, how often | Percentages are of active users, not of all licences. Never-used licences are in the reclaim figure |
| Engagement mix | The whole licensed population in six exclusive bands | — |
| Treemap | Area = share of interactions | Counts interactions, not people. One heavy user can dominate a surface |
| Frequency vs intensity | Position, with your own medians as the dividing lines | The lines are your medians, not industry targets. Bubble area is licences |
| Radar | The shape of engagement, typical user vs your champions | The gap between the outlines is the finding, not their size |
| Concentration | How much of all activity each cohort accounts for | Only active users are ranked |
| Stacked area | Total volume and its composition | Only the bottom band sits on a flat baseline, so only it reads precisely |
The Excel report button exports the whole thing: twelve sheets with live, editable Excel charts bound to the cells — not pictures. You can re-plot, re-theme, and paste them into a board deck.
| Sheet | Use |
|---|---|
| Report | What this file is: period, imports used, every threshold, and any warnings. Read this first when comparing two files |
| Headline figures, Adoption funnel, Engagement | The executive numbers |
| Weekly trend | Six months of history regardless of the period you chose |
| Departments and apps | Every segment breakdown |
| Agents, Unlicensed usage | The two populations Microsoft cannot show you |
| Enablement plan | The size of each job |
| Licensed users, Licence opportunities | The full lists, auto-filtered |
| How this is calculated | Every formula, and the SKU classification |
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Licensed users | People holding at least one SKU classified as a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. The true licence count |
| Analysed / scored users | The licensed users this run actually scored. The same as above unless a very large tenant hit the analysis row cap — every rate is of this number, and the page says so when they differ |
| Active | At least one Copilot interaction in the period. A deliberately low bar |
| Habitual | Engagement of 50+ — Copilot is part of the working week. This is the figure that tracks value. Note it is the weighted score, not simply "opens it often" |
| Dormant | Used Copilot before this period, but not once inside it. Needs a conversation |
| Never used | No Copilot activity at all in the history window. Needs onboarding, or the licence back |
| Reclaimable licences | Dormant + never used |
| Engagement score | 0–100 from frequency (50%), depth (30%) and breadth (20%), each capped |
| Bands | Champion 75+, Established 50+, Developing 25+, Trialling below that |
| How often people open Copilot | Infrequent 1–5, Moderate 6–10, Frequent 11–19, Daily 20+ active days a month. Unweighted — deliberately a different measure from "habitual", so the two can be compared |
| Breadth | How many different Copilot surfaces (Teams, Word, Outlook, Chat…) someone uses |
| Business case score | 0–100 for an unlicensed user. Already using Copilot Chat is worth the most, because it is evidence rather than inference |
| Cowork | Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork. Only shown if actually detected |
| Warning | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "No licence information has been imported" | The user metadata import has not run | Enable it; the tool cannot work without it |
| "Neither the Copilot audit import nor Microsoft's usage report has data" | Every user will look unused | Check Health before acting on anything here |
| "The Copilot audit import has no data … figures come from Microsoft's report" | Falling back. That report covers Microsoft's window, not yours, and excludes unlicensed use | Treat unlicensed figures as unavailable, not as zero |
| "This tenant has 'concealed user information' enabled" | Microsoft's per-user report returns hashed identities | Audit-derived figures are unaffected — this is why the audit import matters |
| "only N users could be analysed" | A very large tenant hit the row cap | Rates describe those N users, not the whole tenant. Do not quote them as tenant-wide |
| "Could not load …" | One query failed; the rest of the report is fine | The named chart is missing. Check Health, then retry |
Why is my adoption rate 100% but habit rate near zero? Everyone opened Copilot at least once and almost nobody kept using it. This is the most common and most expensive pattern, and it is exactly what the adoption rate on its own conceals.
Why do the numbers differ from the Microsoft 365 admin centre? Different sources and windows. This tool primarily uses the Copilot audit log, matching your chosen period exactly and including unlicensed users; Microsoft's dashboard uses its own aggregation window and licensed users only. The How this is calculated tab names the source for every figure.
Why is a Copilot-branded SKU not counted as a Copilot licence? Microsoft ships Copilot-branded products that are not a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence — Copilot Studio, Copilot for Sales. Counting them would inflate the licensed population and make adoption look worse than it is. Every SKU found is listed under How this is calculated, including the excluded ones.
Someone is on the "never used" list but says they use Copilot daily. Check the audit import in Health, and whether they hold a licence at all — heavy Copilot Chat use without a licence appears under Unlicensed usage, not in the licensed list.
Can I change the thresholds? They are defined in the analysis options rather than hard-coded, and every screen quotes the values actually used. Changing them is a code change today — but if you do, remember that two Excel snapshots are only comparable when both used the same values, which is why each file records them.
Why does the agent list not show an agent I know exists? Agents appear only once they have been used. An agent built but never run is invisible here — and to everyone else.
- Copilot Adoption Tool — the specification and design principles
- Copilot analytics — what Copilot data is collected, and when
- Monitoring and Health alerts — checking the imports are running