How to Find Anything in Your Organization With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Power Play 5 of 5: reconstruct any decision, project, or document in seconds, grounded in the content your team already has access to.

Every organization’s real institutional memory is scattered: emails, Teams chats, SharePoint sites, OneDrive folders, files nobody remembers naming clearly. The information almost always exists. People just can’t find it. McKinsey research has consistently estimated that knowledge workers spend roughly 1.8 hours per day, or 9.3 hours per week, searching for and gathering information. IDC has put the figure as high as 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30%of the workday, on information retrieval. Either way, the math is brutal: hire five employees, and the equivalent of one of them spends the year looking for what the other four already wrote.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the most underrated of the five power plays, and arguably the highest-ceiling one once a team builds the habit. It reads across the content you already have permissions to (within Microsoft Graph), and reconstructs the answers in seconds.

How it works

• Open the Microsoft 365 Copilot app or Copilot Chat.
• Ask a natural-language question about a topic.
• Review the synthesized answer along with the citations Copilot provides.
• Ask follow-up questions to surface supporting files and emails.
• Turn the output into a summary or a next-action list.

Key message: Scattered information becomes accessible, usable knowledge.

Why search is the most under-measured productivity loss

Information retrieval was the single most frequently cited time-saver in the UK Department for Work and Pensions Copilot trial, ahead of even email drafting and document summarisation. That ranking matters. It suggests the productivity loss from search isn’t just real, it’s under estimated relative to the more visible failures (the unanswered email, the missed deadline). Search loss happens silently. People simply give up, or move on, or ask the same expert again.

Microsoft’s own 2025 Work Trend Index research found that 62% of survey respondents say they struggle with too much time spent searching for information during the workday. The complaint is widespread, the cost is enormous, and the solution has historically been to hire more people or build more knowledge management. Copilot Chat is a different lever on the same problem: same data, same permissions, much shorter path to the answer.

Why this is the power play with the longest tail

Email Mastery saves you ten minutes today. Enterprise Knowledge in Copilot Chat changes how your organization remembers things over years. Decisions get reconstructed instead of relitigated. Onboarding gets faster because new hires can ask the org instead of asking three people. Subject matter experts get interrupted less because their answers are already in the system. The compounding effect on institutional memory is the part that turns Copilot from a productivity tool into infrastructure.

The rest of the Power Plays series

This is one part of a five-blog series on getting real value from Microsoft 365 Copilot. The other plays in the series:

• Power Play 1: Email Mastery in Outlook
• Power Play 2: Document Drafting in Word
• Power Play 3: Data Insights in Excel
• Power Play 4: Presentation Creation in PowerPoint

The bottom line

This is one of five power plays that consistently earn Microsoft 365 Copilot’s license cost. Pick one to start with, build the habit, then layer in the others as the team gets comfortable. Adoption is the work. The tool is just the lever.

If your team is rolling out Copilot, or planning to, and you want help building the adoption framework, training, and governance to do it well, Advanced Business Solutions can help.

Sources

^[1]McKinsey Global Institute, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies” (knowledge workers spend roughly 1.8 hours per day searching for and gathering information) —https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy

^[2]IDC Information Worker Survey, time spent searching for information (roughly 2.5hours per day, 30% of the workday) —https://m-files.com/resources/en-hub/rt-main-blog-en/how-long-does-it-actually-take-to-find-a-document-dissecting-the-many-stats-out-there

^[3]UK Department for Work and Pensions, Microsoft 365 Copilot evaluation (January 2026) —https://windowsforum.com/threads/dwp-copilot-trial-19-minute-daily-time-savings-with-microsoft-365-copilot.400302/