UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI

The UK Department for Business and Trade ran a trial of Microsoft Copilot for Office 365 from October 2024 to March 2025. The Department finally released its findings last month. [DBT, PDF]

The main uses were “transcribing or summarising a meeting”, “writing an email”, and “summarising written communications”.

The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated. Users could churn out PowerPoint slides faster, but worse. Excel data analysis was slower, and worse.

And Copilot hallucinated all the way through the study.