Microsoft Copilot vs Alex: when to choose which?

Almost every SMB director gets the same question on their plate in 2026: should we do something with AI? The Microsoft reseller turns up with Copilot, your IT supplier talks about "an own AI stack", and LinkedIn shows demos that look impressive but say little about what it actually does for your office.

Concrete question: Microsoft Copilot in Office 365, or an own AI assistant like our Alex? The two aren't comparable — they do fundamentally different things. Anyone framing them as a contest between "two AI assistants" doesn't understand the difference.

Below we explain what each option actually does, in which five scenarios you choose which, and why the combination is often the smartest move.

What Microsoft Copilot actually does

Copilot sits inside your Microsoft 365 environment and helps with Office work your staff already do. Specifically:

• Summarising emails and drafting reply suggestions in Outlook
• Spinning up a document from a prompt in Word
• Running a data analysis on an Excel table
• Generating a PowerPoint from a document or prompt
• Producing meeting notes in Teams after a meeting
• Searching documents and emails on demand ("where is the quote for client X?")

What Copilot cannot do: answer questions about your business-specific processes, your invoices, client dossiers outside M365, your industry software (Exquise, AFAS, ISAH) or your website. Copilot only sees what's in M365: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams.

The licence costs €30.40 per user per month on top of your existing M365 Business Standard. Until 30 June 2026 there's a Microsoft promo of €19.75 per month for 12 months — after that back to €30.40.

What Alex actually does

Alex is our own AI assistant, not a Microsoft product. He sits bottom-right on this page and is available to every prospect and customer. Specifically, Alex:

• Answers pre-sales questions ("What does an online workspace cost for 25 employees?", "Does Exquise run in your cloud?")
• For customers in the portal: handles invoices, contracts, open tickets and user management
• Refers to the right page, person or FAQ
• Handles service-desk work where possible; routes to humans where needed

What Alex doesn't do: write a Word document for you or generate a PowerPoint. He's not a productivity AI inside Office apps — he's your infrastructure AI serving your customer, prospect and team via one chat interface.

The technical stack underneath Alex runs in our NL data centre (n8n, OpenWebUI, own LLM routing). No €30 per user per month — the assistant is even included free for customers with our cloud workspace.

The five scenarios

Scenario 1: Office-heavy staff (Copilot) 20 back-office staff who spend all day in Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams. Lots of email, lots of reports, lots of meeting summaries. Copilot genuinely saves time here — 1 to 2 hours per day per employee is realistic in our client data, provided setup is done right.

Scenario 2: Customer-facing front office (Alex or similar) Practice owner or service business with many client questions that don't need personal attention ("how do I move my appointment?", "what's my invoice status?"). Copilot doesn't help here — it doesn't sit with your customer. An own AI assistant on your site or in your customer portal absorbs 30-60% of first-line questions.

Scenario 3: Industry-software users (neither out of the box) Dentist working all day in Exquise or Visiquick. Or lawyer in Eclipse. Or accountant in AFAS. Copilot does nothing there — it sees your Word documents, not your dossiers in industry software. Alex doesn't do this out of the box either.

For this use case, custom AI is the option: an assistant trained on your industry-software output and your dossier structure. Our partner Nahayat.io builds this on the Alex stack — no Microsoft licence needed, all on own NL hardware.

Scenario 4: AI for the director/owner themselves (Copilot) DGA who plows through weekly reports and handles emails. Copilot for you personally is almost always worth it.

Scenario 5: Whole organisation (combination) The realistic situation for most SMBs of 30-150 staff: a few use Copilot (Office-heaviest roles), the service desk uses Alex, the customer sees Alex on the site, the director has Copilot. Combine what fits.

What we usually recommend

For most SMB clients, we don't start with Copilot for everyone. First Copilot for 3-5 key roles (director, controller, head of sales) to see what it actually delivers. Then roll out broader if it works.

Wondering which licences to enable or which processes benefit from AI? Book a free Copilot readiness call — we'll look at your organisation no-strings and give a concrete recommendation within 1 working day.