Copilot content ideas for email copy

What it does

A pane in the email editor where you type a handful of key points, pick a tone, and get back several drafted passages you can drop into the message. It is a first-draft generator for copy, not a campaign writer — you still edit everything it produces.

Key facts

Built on GPT-3.5 per the documentation, so expect the quality ceiling of that generation of model, not something newer.
Input is 2 to 5 key points. Short fragments produce poor output; three words each is the documented floor and full phrases work better.
If the email already contains 10 or more words, Copilot proposes key points from the existing content rather than making you type them.
You pick a tone of voice before generating. Generation can take up to about 15 seconds.
Supported languages are broad: Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Simplified Chinese.
Enabled by default in the NAM region. Everywhere else it has to be switched on manually.
Manual enablement is under Settings > Overview > Feature switches: turn on Global opt-in consent, and the toggle for Copilot data movement across geographies. The switch names have drifted between doc pages and releases — read what is actually in the tenant rather than trusting a screenshot.
There is an optional mode that grounds suggestions in your own organisation's emails. It needs at least 20 marketing emails in ready-to-send or live state, runs a one-off analysis that can take several hours, and only analyses English emails.
Microsoft states plainly that output may not be factual and that the person publishing is responsible for accuracy and appropriateness. There is an abuse reporting route, and Microsoft can disable the feature for a customer that abuses it.

When to use / skip

Switch it on. It is low-risk, it costs nothing extra beyond the consent toggles, and marketing teams like it. The realistic benefit is getting past the blank editor — first drafts, subject line variations, a second angle on a paragraph someone is stuck on.

Do not sell it as a copywriting replacement, and do not build a business case on it. Where a client has a brand voice guardian, an agency, or regulated copy that goes through legal review, the generated text is a starting point that will be rewritten anyway — still useful, but the time saving is smaller than the demo suggests. The organisation-email grounding mode is the part to be cautious about: it needs a real volume of decent existing emails, and on a fresh implementation you will not have twenty of them for months.

Configuration decisions

Whether to turn on the cross-geography data movement toggle. Outside NAM this is the gate, and it is a data residency conversation with the client's legal or DPO function, not an admin task.
Whether to enable grounding on the organisation's own emails, and if so, whether the existing library is actually representative — twenty bad emails will teach it to write bad emails.
Which languages the marketing team works in, and therefore whether the org-email analysis (English only) is worth anything to them.
Who gets access. There is no per-feature role gate worth speaking of, so this is really about whether everyone in the app should be generating copy.
Your editorial process: does generated copy go through the same approval as hand-written copy, and is that written down anywhere.

Gotchas

The default-on behaviour in NAM catches people out in both directions. A NAM client sees it working with no admin action and assumes it will work in their EMEA sandbox; it will not.
Global opt-in consent is tenant-level and shared with other Copilot features in the app. Turning it off to satisfy one objection kills content rewrite and other capabilities too.
Twenty emails is the floor for org-email grounding, not a target. Getting a genuinely useful result needs considerably more, and the one-off analysis is exactly that — do not expect it to keep learning from every new email you send.
The analysis job takes hours with no meaningful progress indicator. Do not start it the morning of a demo.
Generated copy can be confidently wrong about products, prices and dates. On a regulated client this is the risk to raise, in writing, early.
Language support for generation is wide, but the org-email grounding path is English only. Those two facts get conflated constantly.

Consultant notes

Demo it live with realistic key points from the client's own campaign. Generic "spring sale" prompts produce generic output and undersell it.
Get the consent toggles raised in the same conversation as any other data residency question. Bundling them saves a round trip through the client's legal team.
Tell the marketing lead explicitly that they own the output. It is worth a line in the handover pack, not just a verbal caveat.
Before go-live, check the switches survived any environment copy or reset — feature switch state is one of the things that quietly reverts.
If the client wants brand-voice consistency, set expectations that the org-email grounding mode is a nudge, not a style guide. A written tone-of-voice brief for the team still outperforms it.

Worth revisiting if Microsoft moves this off GPT-3.5 or extends the org-email grounding beyond English.