Plenty of companies pay for both Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT and aren't entirely sure why, or whether they're getting value from both. They overlap in the broad sense that both are AI assistants employees can ask for help, but they are built for genuinely different jobs, and understanding that difference is what actually determines whether either one is worth the license.
Copilot: AI embedded in Microsoft 365
Copilot lives inside the Office apps you already use, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and is grounded in your tenant's own documents, email, and chat history through Microsoft Graph. That makes it genuinely convenient for in-document tasks: summarizing an email thread, drafting a slide from a Word doc, or pulling numbers into a spreadsheet without leaving the app. The tradeoff is that you don't choose the underlying model, and the quality of an answer depends heavily on what Copilot successfully retrieves from your organization's data, which can be excellent or middling depending on how well that data is organized.
ChatGPT: a flexible general assistant
ChatGPT is a standalone assistant where you control the context you paste in directly and can reach some of the strongest available models, along with a wide plugin and tool ecosystem. It is often more powerful for hard, open-ended work, research, brainstorming, complex analysis, precisely because it isn't constrained to only reasoning over documents already in your tenant. The cost of that flexibility is that it sits outside your documents by default and outside your company's data governance, unless someone deliberately copies content in.
Model choice: fixed versus open
This is the crux of the difference. Copilot's model is effectively fixed by Microsoft and changes on Microsoft's schedule, which is fine when that model happens to be well suited to the task at hand and frustrating when it isn't. ChatGPT gives you access to OpenAI's models specifically, which is more choice than Copilot offers, but still locks you to one lab's roadmap rather than the frontier as a whole.
Data governance and where information lives
Copilot's grounding in your tenant is also its governance story: IT already controls what Copilot can see through the same permissions that govern SharePoint and Exchange. ChatGPT, used as a standalone tool, doesn't inherit any of that by default; anything an employee pastes in leaves your existing governance perimeter unless the company has separately configured enterprise controls, which many haven't.
Cost and licensing models
Copilot is typically licensed per seat on top of an existing Microsoft 365 subscription, bundling the assistant with infrastructure you're likely already paying for. ChatGPT's enterprise and team plans are priced and packaged separately, which means a company running both is paying for two AI subscriptions with different metering, different admin consoles, and no shared view of who is actually getting value from which one.
The gap most teams hit
- Copilot is convenient inside documents but capped to one built-in model
- ChatGPT is powerful and flexible but lives away from your files and your governance controls
- Employees end up toggling between the two tools for a single piece of work
- Nobody has one view of spend or usage across both licenses
- The combination teams actually want, frontier models inside their documents, under governance, isn't offered by either alone
How Switchboard helps
Switchboard closes that gap directly. Native Excel, Word, and PowerPoint add-ins put frontier models from multiple providers directly inside your documents, alongside a unified chat for everything else, with routing, per-team budgets, and spend attribution built in from the start. You get the in-document convenience Copilot is known for and the model freedom ChatGPT is known for, governed in one place instead of two separate licenses with two separate blind spots.