Copilot vs INSYNCR: generated and bound

What Copilot is, in one sentence

Microsoft 365 Copilot: the assistant inside Word, Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams that drafts, summarizes and rewrites from a prompt and from the files a user has.

What it is used for

• Drafting slides and outlines from a prompt or a document
• Rewriting, shortening, translating prose
• Summarizing meetings, threads and files
• Answering questions about documents the user has open or uploads

Who typically runs it: anyone on Microsoft 365 with the add on; it is a general assistant, not a reporting tool.

What it costs

Microsoft 365 Copilot is $30.00 per user a month with an annual commitment ($31.50 billed monthly); the Copilot Business bundles for smaller companies are listed at $21 per user a month paid yearly. It requires a Microsoft 365 license underneath.

Source: microsoft.com, Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing, read 20 September 2026. Prices change; check the vendor's page before deciding.

Side by side

What it lacks for a recurring report

• A number you can point at: a generated figure has no address, so nobody downstream can tell a right rule from a plausible wrong one
• A live database behind the firewall: an agent inside PowerPoint works from what the user uploads, today
• A repeatable run: the same deck, the same query, the same numbers every month
• Rules that are deterministic: red when the value is over the limit, every time

We paid someone to test this against us

Rather than argue it, we commissioned Hans De Leenheer, an independent technology consultant and Tech Field Day delegate, to rebuild five of our customers' reporting systems using AI and report what he found whether it suited us or not.

He reproduced all five. One document or several hundred, naming conventions, conditional formatting, tables that grow and shrink with the data, a second language, images, video, and eligibility rules calculated from raw records. About half a day per case. In his words, AI "landed further along the curve than we drew it", and it was "not a close call".

We are publishing that because it is true, and because of what he found next.

Our test users could run the systems and could not audit them. They could not write the rule that decides who graduates or how a survey score rolls up, and more importantly, they could not tell a correct rule from a plausible one.

Better models do not fix that. They make it harder, because as generated output becomes more fluent, wrong output becomes more convincing and the friction that used to signal trouble disappears.

A bound field is different in kind from a generated one. It can be inspected, pointed at, and explained to somebody who cannot read code.

Hans De Leenheer, independent review of five INSYNCR customer systems, September 2026

That is the gap worth understanding before choosing either tool. It is not that AI gets the number wrong more often. It is that when it does, nothing on the slide tells you, and the better the model gets the more convincing the wrong answer looks.

We paid for this review and we are quoting the part that is least flattering to us, because you will find it out anyway and we would rather you heard it here.

Where Copilot is better than INSYNCR

• Writing. Commentary, summaries and structure, in any language, in seconds
• Working across Outlook, Teams and Word, not only PowerPoint
• Price and availability: it is already in many Microsoft 365 tenants

Which to pick

Use Copilot for the prose and INSYNCR for every number, chart and table that has to match the ledger. They are not substitutes: one writes, the other binds. If the report has a consequence when it is wrong, the numbers need an address.