Copilot in Edge for work

Most of the time you reach Copilot through an Office app or Teams. Edge puts it one click away from whatever you're already reading — a webpage, an internal SharePoint article, a PDF report someone emailed you.

Where to find it

The Copilot icon sits in Edge's toolbar and opens a sidebar alongside the page. Signed in with your work account, it operates with your Microsoft 365 Copilot licence and enterprise data handling; the same icon exists for anyone using Edge, but without a work sign-in and licence it behaves as the general consumer Copilot experience instead.

What it does

Summarise the current page. Open a long article, report, or internal wiki page and ask for a summary — useful for deciding quickly whether something's worth reading in full.

Answer questions about a PDF. Open a PDF in Edge's built-in viewer and ask Copilot questions about it directly, without needing to open it in a separate reader.

Compare across tabs. With several tabs open — say, three vendor proposals — ask Copilot to compare them on a specific point. It reads across the open tabs rather than making you flip between them manually.

Draft from what you're reading. Ask it to turn a page into a summary email, a set of talking points, or a shorter version, similar to summarising in Word but starting from a webpage instead of a document.

What it needs

For the work-identity experience described here, a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence and signing into Edge with your work account. IT can also manage Copilot's availability in Edge through browser policy the same way other Edge features are managed, so its presence can vary by organisation. Check current licensing and your organisation's Edge policy if the sidebar looks different from what's described here.

Research across a topic. Ask a general question while browsing and Copilot can combine what it knows with the open page's content, useful for quickly checking a claim or getting background on something you're reading without opening a new search tab and losing your place.

Signing in with the right identity

If Edge is signed into a personal Microsoft account rather than your work one, or you're using an Edge profile you set up before joining your organisation, the sidebar behaves like consumer Copilot rather than the licensed work experience — worth checking your profile in the top corner of the browser if the sidebar's answers seem to be missing context it should have from your organisation.

Where it falls short

Pages behind authentication that Edge itself can't load properly (some single-sign-on portals, some legacy intranet pages) can't be summarised if Edge can't render them in the first place. Very long PDFs may need to be asked about in sections rather than summarised whole. And comparisons across tabs work best with a handful of tabs — asking it to synthesise across fifteen open tabs at once tends to produce a vaguer answer than picking the two or three that matter and asking about those specifically.