We're vendor-neutral on AI. We build on Claude, Copilot, GPT and open-source models depending on the job, and we don't take commissions on licences. So this isn't a pitch for either side.
If your team lives in Outlook, Teams and SharePoint and you want an assistant inside those apps with your tenant's permissions applied, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the natural fit.
If the work is heavier thinking – long documents, analysis, drafting that actually sounds human, coding, or automations that run without a person driving – Claude is the stronger tool.
Plenty of businesses run both. They do different jobs, and the licence maths works out fine when each one is only bought for the people who'll use it.
An add-on licence for your Microsoft 365 plan. It puts an assistant inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, grounded in your own emails, files and chats through Microsoft Graph. Your data stays inside your tenant's compliance boundary.
~A$45 /user/month + GST, on top of an eligible base licence (Business Standard, Business Premium, E3 or E5)
Most businesses meet Claude as a chat app or the Team plan, but it's also an API for building automations, and since May 2026 it has its own add-ins for Excel, PowerPoint and Word, with Outlook on the way. So "Claude lives outside Office" is no longer true.
Claude Team ~US$25–30 /seat/month (≈A$38–45, 5-seat min) · API usage for automations: typically dollars per month per workflow
PRICES AS AT JULY 2026 · THEY MOVE · CHECK CURRENT RATES BEFORE COMMITTING, OR ASK US
Copilot's advantage is that it's already where your people work. Summarise this thread, draft a reply, recap the Teams meeting, find the document. It respects existing permissions and keeps data inside the tenant, which makes governance conversations easier.
The honest caveat: adoption is the problem, not the technology. Industry reporting in early 2026 put Copilot at roughly 15 million seats sold out of about 450 million Microsoft 365 users. We regularly audit tenants where Copilot licences are being paid for and barely used. A licence without a use case is just a subscription.
Claude is consistently stronger at sustained reasoning: reading a 100-page contract and answering questions about it properly, writing that doesn't need heavy editing, code, and multi-step work.
The bigger difference is automation. Claude is built to be wired into your systems, so the AI does the work without a person prompting it. The largest build we've published is a construction PM firm's monthly reporting on Claude and Azure, inside their own Microsoft 365 tenant: a roughly 3-hour report task now takes about 30 minutes.
Copilot for the people who live in Outlook and Teams. Claude for the analysts, writers and builders, and for the automations behind the scenes. There's no technical conflict – Claude builds run happily inside a Microsoft 365 and Azure environment.
Don't start with the licence. Start with the two or three tasks that eat the most hours in your business, then pick the tool that kills those tasks. Sometimes that's Copilot. Sometimes it's a Claude build. Sometimes it's Power Automate and no AI at all.
That's the exercise our AI Readiness Sprint runs in two weeks, and the free AI Readiness Quiz is a decent first pass. If neither tool would earn its licence in your business yet, we'll say so.
Copilot, Claude, or neither yet – you'll get a straight answer either way.