From my perspective, Microsoft Copilot for Business is genuinely useful if you’re already deep in Microsoft 365 and your data-residency requirements are relaxed. For most UK SMEs I speak to, specially regulated practices, the gap opens on three questions. Where is client data physically processed. Who holds the keys. Can we prove to a regulator that AI use is controlled.
I believe Copilot answers all three partially, and partial answers tend not to satisfy UK regulators. Here’s the honest comparison.
Data residency
Copilot for Microsoft 365 uses Azure OpenAI Service, which can be configured to process data in specific geographic boundaries. However, the default behaviour and the available region mix aren’t always UK-only — data may be processed in EU data centres, and in some Copilot workflows cross-region traffic occurs.
For most UK SMEs, “EU data centres” is legally workable. For regulated practices with clients who ask specifically about UK-only processing, it’s not a clean answer. Specially financial services, legal services, and healthcare clients are increasingly asking this question directly.
Governance + audit
Copilot has Microsoft Purview integration for audit — which is a real capability if you’re already running Purview. If you’re not, the audit footprint is limited. You can see who used Copilot and when, but reconstructing a specific AI interaction end-to-end — which data it saw, which prompt produced which output, who signed off — requires significant Purview configuration and typically a dedicated IT admin.
For a 12-person accountancy practice, this overhead is unrealistic. Apart from this, the audit doesn’t natively include client-level scope — you can’t trivially filter “all AI interactions on this client matter,” which is exactly what an ICAEW QAD reviewer will ask for.
Integrations outside Microsoft
Copilot’s value is strongest when you’re all-in on Microsoft — Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Excel, Dynamics. For UK SMEs, this isn’t the typical stack. Xero dominates accountancy, not Dynamics. HubSpot and Pipedrive are common in sales. Zoho Books is a growing alternative. The firms I work with live across Microsoft, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Jira, Notion and Airtable.
Copilot doesn’t natively integrate with most of these. You can chat about them, but you can’t give Copilot scope-locked access to your HubSpot records in a way that keeps client data governed. Specially for client-facing professional-services work, this is the whole workflow that matters.
Pricing
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is around £30 per user per month, requiring an underlying Microsoft 365 subscription. For a 10-person firm that’s £300/month for Copilot alone. Other Me is priced per seat — £24/month for the admin owner plus £15/month per additional member, so that same 10-person firm is £159/month — and the whole AI suite is included in the seat: all the models, the non-Microsoft integrations, and the audit chain designed for SME-scale.
When Copilot is the right answer
Specially in all-Microsoft shops with dedicated IT admin and Purview already running, Copilot is a sensible choice. For professional services SMEs with mixed stacks and no dedicated IT admin, the fit is weaker. I believe the question isn’t which tool is better in abstract — it’s which tool fits your specific practice.
Other Me’s position
At the heart of this is SCRS — our Secure Context Retrieval System, a patent-pending AI data firewall sold per company. Those per-client vaults at the retrieval layer are SCRS doing its job. Other Me is the per-seat governed workspace built on top of it, for UK SME practices with mixed stacks: UK data residency by default, no Purview required, and connections to HubSpot, Jira, Notion and Airtable alongside Google Workspace and Office-compatible documents.
See the Built for UK SMEs page for the full framing, or the vertical-specific pages for your practice type. Both products are self-serve — you can get started with SCRS or try Other Me — so you can test against your real workflow before deciding.