Flying blind with Copilot? N-able’s Ben Lee makes sense of it for MSPs

Ben Lee has spent years helping MSPs turn complex technology into practical, profitable solutions. As a Head Nerd at N‑able, he’s seen the AI hype cycle up close, and knows that when it comes to Microsoft 365 Copilot, clarity beats buzzwords every time.

At MSP GLOBAL 2025, Ben will strip away the noise to show MSPs exactly what Copilot is (and isn’t), where it can genuinely add value, and the pitfalls to avoid when rolling it out. His focus is on giving MSPs the insight to make smart, confident decisions, whether that’s advising customers on adoption or shaping their own internal Copilot strategy. Expect a grounded, hands‑on perspective that balances opportunity with risk awareness.

Ahead of his session, we sat down with Ben to talk about how MSPs can cut through the Copilot hype, identify where it truly fits into their service offering, and use it to drive value for both their business and their clients. Take it away, Ben!

Understand what Copilot is—and what it isn’t

The first thing to understand about Copilot is that there are different variants of Copilot. And inside those variants, there are what I like to call different personalities.

Then there is the free functionality, which you get either as a public user or if you have an EntraID account, which has some security guardrails and protections. And then there is the full paid-for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

One of the challenges I see is people understanding the differences in functionality and capability across those different versions. We’re in a hype cycle for AI and GenAI solutions at the moment. The misunderstanding is that these solutions will do everything for you and they’ll solve all your problems.

In my previous life, I was an IT consultant and I did work around Copilot deployments and onboarding. One of my golden rules was to make sure you’re setting expectations.

Copilot is developing fast—and so are its use cases for MSPs

Copilot is a fast-evolving product. In the last two months Microsoft have added Copilot Notebooks, which is a functionality where you curate sources or data. Then when you ask it questions, either about something new or about the data, it will filter it through that information.

A nice use case for this for an MSP would be helping with the output of a ticket. Maybe there was a disk failure or a driver issue. Copilot Notebooks can hold old ticket responses as a reference. You put them in your notebook and then when you say, “This is the note out of the internal ticketing system, I need to generate this into something that’s good enough to go to a customer”, it can filter through how you’ve written that ticket before. It’s a little “side bit” of Copilot that you can use.

Free vs. paid

If you look at the roadmap, Microsoft is starting to push more functionality into the free version. But the differentiator between the two is supposed to be that Microsoft 365 Copilot can help you with your data in a safe way. It has access to your team’s conversations, your email, the files that you are working on, whereas the free one is more “find me some information from the web”.

MSPs need to understand the difference between those licenses and make sure that there is value in the paid-for license. There usually is, but it’s a case of identifying the use cases. How is this going to help you day to day? What can it do for you? Where can it make your life easier? Where does it not work? Where should you not use it?

It’s about permissions, not access

There’s this notion that by deploying Copilot, suddenly you’re giving employees access to data that they maybe shouldn’t have access to or didn’t have access to before. That’s a slight misnomer because the issue is Copilot can see all of the data that you have permission to see.

Copilot doesn’t change your access rights or your permissions, but instead makes it easier to find stuff that you maybe couldn’t manually find yourself.

The root issue is that a lot of organisations have SharePoint libraries, which are set to share to all people in the business, and permissions have never been rescinded when it’s appropriate.

From a technical readiness point of view, it’s making sure that the business is aware that there are risks of data being exposed to those with legacy permissions. Microsoft provides tooling that can help explore that and understand it. It’s a case of understanding and minimizing the risk.

Context is king

There are different flavors of Copilot, and also different personalities of Copilot. That’s something that is very easy to overlook. When you ask Copilot in Word to do something, it is different to asking Copilot in your web browser to do something, or Copilot in Teams to do something, because each one is tuned to the context in which you are using them.

We will end up with an overarching Copilot that you talk to that knows how to interact inward in PowerPoint and Excel and so on. But today, it has different personalities. They are tuned for job-specific roles.

You need to have a broader understanding of which Copilot is suitable for which job, and then take the data between those things to accomplish your task. One of the analogies I’ve seen is that you’re a conductor of the orchestra and the different Copilot agents are the different pieces of the orchestra, and you’re pulling the strings to get the end result that you want.

Don’t just “turn it on and see”

We’ve had history in the industry with things like Microsoft Delve. There was this notion that a Delve page showed you all of this stuff your colleagues had been working on. But the fundamental issue wasn’t that the data was suddenly exposed to you, it’s just that there was a portal that showed you data you could access. It’s a similar thing with Copilot.

Understand what the risks might be for client data that is in their environment. There is tooling like SharePoint Advanced Management that comes as a free license alongside the Copilot paid-for license that helps you audit your environment and your estate.

For an MSP, help customers understand that there’s a seesaw of risk. Show them that if sensitive data is exposed, this is what the remediation might look like, or this is how we control the deployment, or this is how we limit and restrict the semantic index searching so that data isn’t included in it. It’s just about understanding the risk and that it’s not just “turn it on and see”.

Copilot vs. other AI agents

Microsoft has a long history of building solutions that run at scale with Microsoft 365 and that take into consideration data security, data and environmental protections. And Copilot runs inside that secure Microsoft 365 perimeter, so you aren’t necessarily exposing stuff in other places.

There are a lot of challenges with AI models around how you tune and train them, where they get their data from, and biases. We have Anthropic’sClaude (Google), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, X’s Grok and more. They are all different models that you can plug into for different circumstances. But with Copilot, it is actually using different models depending on what task you’re using it for. So when you’re using it in Excel, it might give you access to a different model.

The industry is figuring itself out. I think the basic tenants that Microsoft have built into Copilot around data security, data protection, and responsible use of AI are helping set the trends that the others are adhering to.

Keep an eye on the roadmap

What we’ve seen over the last six months is a shift to agentic AI—specific agents that are created with access to specific data sources or filtered through specific sets of information, are customized and know how to interact with that data.

As the “conductor of the orchestra”, that’s where these agents fit in, as they are more task-focused. So in the short to medium term, more and more will be accessible through agents, and we’ll be able to do more in a centralized fashion.

For an MSP and their customers, the ability to create customized agents that interact with the line of business data or line of business applications is going to be huge.

MSPs need to make sure they understand the solution that is available today and keep an eye on the roadmap of what that looks like in future. Even for a client who might not be suited to Copilot right now, there will be a tipping point in six months, a year, two years where that will change. There’s a responsibility to understand how Microsoft 365 is evolving.

Catch Ben’s session, “Making Sense of Microsoft 365 Copilot: A Practical Guide for MSPs”, at the MSP GLOBAL 2025.

When: Wednesday October 22^nd, 3:05pm-3:20pm

Where: Elevator Stage

It’s not too late to sign up to attend—register here.