Copilot vs Claude vs ChatGPT: which AI training does your team need?

The most useful question is not "which AI is best?" but "what can our people open today, under which contract?"

If you run Microsoft 365, many of your staff may already have access to Copilot Chat. What Copilot can draw on, from the web and files a user uploads to emails, meetings, chats, documents and sites the user already has permission to see, depends on the Copilot features your organisation has. Your IT team or Microsoft partner can confirm who has what; see Microsoft's Copilot overview.

A naming note: Microsoft now calls Microsoft 365 Copilot "Microsoft Copilot" and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat "Microsoft Copilot Chat", and says older names may appear during the transition. You will see both in admin centres and course material.

If some teams pay for ChatGPT or Claude, find out which plan. A business plan (ChatGPT Business or Enterprise, Claude Team or Enterprise) gives you admin controls and business data terms. A personal account bought on an expense claim does not.

If nobody has a business AI tool yet, the choice is wider, but it is still usually shaped by what your IT team already supports.

Sources for the table are linked in the sections below.

Copilot is the natural starting point for most UK organisations on Microsoft 365, because it sits inside tools people already use all day. Typical early use cases are summarising long email threads in Outlook, getting a recap of a Teams meeting, drafting a first version in Word from existing documents, and asking questions of a spreadsheet in Excel.

Data and governance. Microsoft states that Copilot respects your identity model and permissions, inherits your sensitivity labels and applies your retention policies, and that prompts, responses and data accessed through Microsoft Graph are not used to train foundation models. The catch is that "respects permissions" means Copilot can surface anything a user is already allowed to see, including files that were shared too widely years ago. Microsoft's own deployment guidance for a secure and governed foundation puts "remediate oversharing" as step one.

There is also a newer point for UK organisations. Microsoft now offers Anthropic's Claude models inside some Copilot experiences, and Microsoft documents admin settings for Anthropic as an AI subprocessor and for Copilot in Word, Excel and PowerPoint with Anthropic models. Your IT team should check both settings.

How training differs. Good Copilot training is app by app and task by task: what to ask in Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and how the answer changes depending on whether someone has Copilot Chat or a full licence. It should also show people why Copilot sometimes finds a document they did not expect, and what to do about it. Microsoft publishes free Copilot learning paths on Microsoft Learn and an adoption hub, which are worth using alongside live training.

Day Seven runs readiness checks and training only. We do not provision licences, set up tenants or configure Copilot; that stays with your IT team or Microsoft partner.

ChatGPT suits teams that want a broad, general-purpose assistant for drafting, research, analysis and brainstorming, and organisations that are not tied to one productivity suite. It is also where many staff first tried AI, so some people arrive at training with habits, good and bad, already formed.

Data and governance. OpenAI says that for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise it does not train its models on your business data by default, supports SAML single sign-on, lets admins control which apps are enabled, and that ChatGPT respects your organisation's existing permissions when it connects to other systems. Staff can build and share GPTs inside the workspace, and admins decide whether GPTs can be shared publicly. On ChatGPT Business, workspace admins can view, export and delete conversations; on Enterprise, admins control retention and can access audit logs through a compliance API.

For UK organisations with data location requirements, OpenAI offers UK data residency for eligible new ChatGPT Enterprise workspaces, which covers storage at rest for in-scope content such as conversations, files and custom GPTs.

How training differs. ChatGPT training spends more time on choosing the right model or mode for a task, building custom GPTs that colleagues can reuse, and agreeing which connected apps are allowed. OpenAI's free OpenAI Academy is a good self-study complement.

Claude tends to suit teams whose work involves long documents, careful writing, policy and contract review, research and analysis, and teams that want to package a repeatable way of working so others can follow it.

Data and governance. Anthropic says that by default it will not use inputs or outputs from its commercial products, such as Claude for Work, to train its models. The Claude Team plan includes single sign-on and domain capture, role-based permissions, spend controls, Projects, a 200k context window for long documents, and connectors to Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub, Microsoft 365 and Slack. The Enterprise plan adds audit logs, SCIM, custom data retention and a compliance API.

How training differs. Most of the material overlaps with ChatGPT training. The Claude-specific part covers Projects, working across very long documents, Artifacts, Skills (packaging a repeatable task) and connectors, including the questions to put to IT and security before enabling any connector. Anthropic's free Claude Academy is worth pointing keen learners to.

Whichever tool you choose, the biggest practical risk is staff using personal accounts for work. The business terms above do not apply to them.

• Anthropic says that on its consumer plans (Free, Pro and Max) it will use chats to improve its models if the user chooses to allow it.
• OpenAI says it uses data from versions of ChatGPT for individuals as one of its training sources, unlike its business plans.

So the first governance step is simple: decide which tool and plan is approved, make it easy to get, and say plainly in a short policy what may and may not be pasted in. Our guide to writing an employee AI policy covers this.

Roughly the same core skills apply to all three tools:

• Briefing well: giving context, an example and a clear output format.
• Checking output: spotting confident errors, checking figures and sources, and knowing when not to use AI at all.
• Safe data use: knowing what is approved for your plan and what is never pasted in.
• Making it stick: picking two or three real tasks per person, building a shared prompt library, and reviewing what worked a month later.

This is why teams with more than one tool rarely need two separate courses. Teach the shared foundations once, then add short tool-specific sessions.

1. What can people open today under a business contract? Start there.
2. Where does the work happen? If it is mostly Outlook, Teams and Word, Copilot keeps AI in the flow of work. If it is long documents and analysis, Claude or ChatGPT may serve better.
3. What will IT support and govern? A tool nobody can configure or monitor is a risk, not a shortcut.
4. Which three or four tasks matter most? Test each candidate tool on those tasks before you train everyone.
5. Who needs what depth? Most staff need confident everyday use. A smaller group may need to build Copilot Studio agents, custom GPTs or Claude Skills.

Our free AI readiness scorecard scores your team on strategy, tools, skills, adoption and governance in about three minutes, and is a quick way to answer questions one and three.

Pick the tool your people can already use safely at work, check the governance basics (oversharing for Copilot, connectors and sharing settings for ChatGPT and Claude), and then train on real tasks rather than features. If you use more than one tool, teach the shared foundations once and add short tool-specific sessions. Measure weekly use and time saved on named tasks, not attendance.

• Microsoft Copilot training
• ChatGPT training
• Claude training
• Claude vs ChatGPT for business
• AI readiness scorecard
• Day Seven Academy: Copilot Essentials and Claude Essentials
• AI training costs
• Choosing an AI training provider

Not sure which tool to train on first? Book a free 60-minute discovery call with Qasim or send us a message. We will look at what your team already has and suggest a sensible starting point, with no obligation.