Checklist: Is your organisation ready for Copilot? 

Microsoft Ignite 2025 made one thing clear: Copilot adoption is about to accelerate.

Earlier, we wrote about what’s coming to Microsoft at Ignite and how this wave of announcements brings huge opportunities for many. The updates have shown a shift from tools that are simply assisting to agents that can operate and take action across the Microsoft ecosystems. The potential is massive!

While the excitement is justified, it also raises other practical considerations: how these new capabilities place more weight on the systems Copilot depends on behind the scenes.

Copilot will perform only as well as the environment it’s plugged into

Before you rush to integrate Copilot, this would be the right moment to take a step back and assess whether Copilot has the right foundations within your organisation to operate safely and accurately.

At Ekco, we often speak to customers who are excited about the possibilities of Copilot and want to deploy it. But when we look under the hood, we discover small but significant gaps that fall short of Microsoft’s Copilot setup recommendations.

Copilot isn’t a standalone tool and its output is shaped directly by data quality, identity configuration, cloud architecture and overall security posture. If your data is disorganised or if your cloud environment isn’t optimised, Copilot will reveal these issues in the way it gathers and presents results.

Our 2025 Infrastructure Modernisation Report shows that only one in five organisations feel they’re using the cloud to its full potential, and over a third believe their cloud security isn’t performing as it should. Copilot will make these weaknesses even more visible, because it touches the same data, identity systems, and workloads that teams rely on daily.

Copilot readiness as an advantage

As Microsoft moves Copilot into agentic territory, where it can update documents, initiate processes and act within apps on behalf of users, the state of the underlying systems shapes not just what Copilot surfaces but what it will do next.

And this has a direct cost. When organisations purchase Copilot licences before checking infrastructural readiness, a significant portion of those licences can end up unused. Users technically have access, but Copilot can’t complete tasks, reach the right data, or run actions reliably.

Readiness removes that waste, ensuring every licence you buy is used as intended.

Your Copilot readiness checklist

The good news is that these are not unusual problems and are common across organisations that have grown, merged systems, or lived through phases of cloud adoption. The issues we’ve uncovered won’t break Copilot, but it will ultimately limit its value.

Before you launch Copilot, here are seven areas worth assessing before you make the switch:

• Data structure and hygiene – Is your file estate organised, labelled, and permissioned in a way Copilot can interpret?
• Access and permissions accuracy – Are permissions up to date, with legacy “temporary access” or broad group permissions removed?
• Identify configuration – Is your identity setup still dependent on legacy AD components or sync paths that create inconsistency?
• Cloud configuration and optimisation – Are your Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads aligned with Microsoft’s recommended configurations?
• Licensing and user scope – Do you have a clear view of which Copilot licences are required for your first wave of users, and is your current estate aligned to support them?
• User readiness and responsible usage – Have you prepared staff with the basics: how to ask effective prompts, what Copilot can and cannot access, and how to handle output responsibly?
• Measurement and governance – Is there a defined process for tracking usage, value, and issues after rollout?

Still curious about where you stand?

Book an alignment call with our experts to ensure your environment is ready to support everything Copilot can do.

Book your Copilot readiness consultation