A Powerful Opportunity for Small Businesses To Embrace AI in 2026

This fall, Microsoft announced a new offering called Copilot Business. The name may sound similar to existing licensing, but the artificial intelligence offering is aimed at organizations with 300 or fewer users, and it comes at a substantial discount compared with Microsoft’s enterprise Copilot products.

This means that small and medium-sized organizations now face a substantially lower barrier to entry for AI, making 2026 the perfect time to validate use cases and train up their employees. In fact, enterprises have spent much of the past two years in AI trial-and-error mode, meaning that small organizations are positioned to learn from both the early wins and mistakes of others.

For organizations without existing AI expertise, CDW’s Copilot QuickStart engagement can help accelerate time to value, ensuring that organizations start seeing a return on their AI investments as soon as possible.

Enterprises have been aggressive in their adoption of AI over the past year, collectively spending many billions of dollars to try to find ways to automate large chunks of their operations.

However, much of this spending has gone to experimentation, and many AI projects have gotten bogged down in the pilot stage — never making their way to production. In a QuickStart engagement, we work with business and IT leaders to identify quick wins.

A natural place to start is with meetings. Copilot integrates seamlessly with organizations’ Microsoft Teams environments, and many organizations will find that automated transcription and meeting summaries alone are worth the lower Copilot Business pricing. Other common early use cases include employee onboarding and content creation.

Many business leaders are understandably skittish about introducing a powerful new tool such as Copilot into their environments for the first time, worried that the tool will allow employees to view data that they shouldn’t be able to access. 

This is a very valid concern. But the issue isn’t with Copilot itself. Rather, problems arise when organizations already have poor data governance practices in place. For example, consider what might happen if sensitive HR data isn’t adequately protected by access controls. Most employees probably don’t know where to find that information, and so the potential vulnerability never becomes a real-world problem.

But once the organization introduces Copilot, the tool will reach into every accessible corner of the environment to find answers. During a QuickStart, we help organizations identify and lock down their sensitive data, ensuring that Copilot only provides users with the information they’re authorized to access.

It’s a bit surprising how many organizations seem to overlook employee training when rolling out AI. This might be because the technology is very new, and organizations lack the internal expertise to design and deliver training effectively. Too often, businesses roll out AI tools to their employees with the hope that workers themselves will discover high-value use cases, but this typically leads to confusion, and many employees end up abandoning the AI tools. 

A QuickStart includes live training sessions, helping to ensure user adoption. Also, CDW’s Inscape learning platform offers on-demand training modules and lets leaders track how employees are using Copilot.

Some business and IT leaders at smaller and medium-sized organizations seem to feel that they are woefully behind when it comes to AI adoption — and that there’s no way for them to catch up. But the Copilot Business licensing tier, combined with CDW’s QuickStart engagement, can offer these organizations the chance to hit the ground running in 2026.