12.1 Copilot: what it can and cannot do
You use it where it helps and check it where it does not.
Before:00. Getting Your Footing
Copilot is useful precisely to the degree its limits are understood, and this topic covers what it can see — your files, your mail, your organisation's tenant — where it is reliable, where it invents, and what privacy and retention mean in practice. It opens the Copilot module because the verification habit has to come before the usage habits: never ship a number it produced without checking it. The common confusion is treating fluent output as checked output; confidence in the writing says nothing about the truth of the contents.
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What it sees: your files, your mail, your tenant
What the assistant can see is bounded by your files, your messages and your organisation's data. Knowing the boundary explains both its usefulness and its blind spots.
Where it is reliable and where it invents
It is dependable at rephrasing, summarising and drafting from material you supply, and it invents confidently when asked for facts it does not have. Separating those two uses is the skill.
The verification habit: never ship a number you did not check
Never pass on a figure you have not checked yourself. This is the single habit that makes the tool safe to use in work anyone depends on.
Privacy, retention and what your organisation can see
What is retained, what your organisation can see, and what happens to the content you paste in are real questions. They have real answers, worth knowing before you rely on it.
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