Do you know which Copilot you have?

This week, I checked ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini against each company's own pricing and help pages, because a piece of AI advice is only useful if you are allowed to use the tool it names.

The main thing I learned is that most of what you can and cannot do at work is set by the plan your company bought, not by the AI inside it.

Do you know which Copilot you have?

If your company runs on Microsoft 365, there are three levels with almost the same name, and Microsoft prints your company's name under your name at the bottom of the Microsoft 365 home page.

Copilot Chat (Basic) answers from the web and from files you upload, and it can use an email or Teams chat you have open. It has no Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote.

M365 Copilot (Basic) adds standard Copilot inside those apps, so you can draft in Word, build formulas and charts in Excel, make decks in PowerPoint and get meeting summaries in Teams, though it can slow down at busy times.

M365 Copilot (Premium) is the paid license, at $18 to $21 a person on business plans and $30 on enterprise. It is the only level where Copilot searches your email, chats, meetings and files for you without you uploading anything.

Microsoft reported over 30 million paid seats in July. Estimates of how many people use Microsoft 365 at work put that at roughly one seat in fifteen, so most of you are on one of the two Basic levels.

Microsoft added Claude Opus 5 to Word, Excel and PowerPoint the day Anthropic released it in July, and Fable 5.1 to Cowork the day it launched on 1 September. But Microsoft says those models only appear in licensed Copilot and are not on for everyone by default, so whether you see them is your admin's call.

Gemini depends on your Workspace tier

Gemini comes with every Google Workspace plan, but not in the same place. On Business Starter, at $7 a person, it lives in Gmail and the Gemini app. Business Standard, at $14, is the lowest tier that puts it inside Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet and Drive, where it takes meeting notes and translates captions.

Google doesn't provide employees with a page that shows the edition. Open a file in Google Drive or Docs and look for the star-shaped Gemini button at the top right. If it opens a Gemini panel, you are on Business Standard or above.

ChatGPT and Claude on a company plan

Both start at $20 a seat for teams, and both promise no training on your business data by default.

ChatGPT has extensions inside Excel, PowerPoint and Google Sheets, which makes it the only one of the four that works in both Excel and Sheets. That matters if your clients send you files in both. Its Skills and custom connections only exist on company plans, where only an admin can turn them on, and GPT-6 Astra, the model OpenAI advertises on its $20 personal plan, is not on the Business plan's model list.

Claude works inside Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and connects to 816 tools from its directory, including Slack, HubSpot, Asana, monday.com, Zoom, and Canva. On Team and Enterprise, only the account owner can add a connection of their own. It has no Google Sheets extension, and it does not generate images at all.

Connecting to your registration platform

None of Cvent, Swoogo, Bizzabo, Eventbrite or vFairs is in Claude's directory, and that does not rule it out. Swoogo shipped a server with 23 tools this year, vFairs followed read-only, and Cvent announced its version, so a connection can be added by hand.

On a company plan, though, someone other than you nearly always adds it. On Claude, it is the account owner, on ChatGPT, an admin, on Copilot, whoever builds agents in Copilot Studio, and on Gemini, an admin on Gemini Enterprise. On Claude, if the platform sits behind your company's firewall, IT also has to let Anthropic's servers through.

What happens to your attendee data

On company plans, none of the four trains its models on your data by default. On personal plans, ChatGPT trains on your chats unless you opt out. Gemini does too when Keep Activity is on, and it sends some chats to human reviewers. Claude's personal plans only train if you enable the setting.

So before an attendee list goes anywhere, check which account you are signed into.

Why the benchmark scores do not settle this

Stanford's 2026 AI Index found that close to half of the sixty most-cited benchmarks no longer separate the leading models, because they all score above about 90 percent. And a score measures the model plus the setup around it, which can move the same model by 25 points.

A planner on M365 Copilot (Premium) and a planner on Claude Pro can run the identical Claude Opus 5 and get different results, because one product can search their company's Microsoft email and files, and the other can reach 816 connectors. You are never choosing a model; you are choosing a product with one inside it.

If you are already building things

If you are past saved prompts, I think Claude is the place to be right now. I am not neutral on this, since I teach a Claude course for event professionals with Julius Solaris and run my company on it, though nobody is paying me to say so. The others have closed ground this year, with Cowork and both Claude models inside Copilot, and Skills and agents on ChatGPT's company plans. What sets Claude apart for me is how much of it works without asking anyone. On a personal $20 Pro plan, you get Skills, 816 connectors, your own custom connections, and Claude Code, where ChatGPT keeps Skills and custom connections behind a company admin.

For promotional graphics, you will still need ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, Higgsfield, or Copilot next to it. And none of this helps if IT will not approve it, so open the tool you can use on Monday first.

If you take one thing from this

Find out which plan your company bought and what your admin switched on, because that answer decides more than which AI is inside. If you are on Microsoft 365, it is the label under your name.

Then take one job you decided AI could not help with, the recap nobody wants to build, or the timeline you redo every time a speaker moves, and try it once more.

I put the full breakdown into a single document, including every tier and price, with a link to each source.

Read the full breakdown here: AI Platforms for Event Teams →

If you missed Tuesday's issue, the AI Readiness Assessment asks which of these four you can open and writes its fix for that one.

Take the assessment here: AI Readiness Assessment →

Till next time,
Noah

Do More With Less Using AI

PS: Let me know what platform you’re using - I’m curious if there are features I mention here that you didn’t know it could accomplish.