In my AI for Excel and Copilot trainings, one of the most common questions I get is some variation of:
“Is Copilot safe? Should I be worried about data privacy?”
It comes up so often I figured… alright, time to write a post about it. And just to be clear: I am not a cybersecurity expert. I am not an IT expert. I am an Excel person. I know the tools, I know how they work, and I know enough about data products to say: use the paid Copilot tools, not the free ones.
I’ve also been around technology long enough to see patterns that people miss when they ask this question. So let’s start there.
Is this really a new concern, or did we just start noticing?
Every time someone asks whether Copilot is “safe,” there’s this underlying assumption that AI is somehow the first time we’ve ever put sensitive data into the cloud. And it just… isn’t.
We’ve been trusting the cloud with the most intimate parts of our work and personal lives for a very long time: email, Teams, payroll systems, banking apps, personal photos, HR files, entire corporate file repositories. If you send an email, look at your pay stub online, or store documents in OneDrive or SharePoint, you are already way deep into cloud territory.
So if Copilot is the thing that suddenly makes you stop and go, “Wait, is this secure?” … that isn’t because AI invented a brand-new category of danger. It’s because we’ve forgotten just how much of our digital life was already happening in the cloud long before AI showed up at the office.
And here’s the important part: when you use Microsoft 365 Copilot (the enterprise paid version, that is) you’re not sending files to some mysterious AI in the sky. You’re staying inside the same security framework your organization already trusts for email, files, chat, HR documents, and everything else. Copilot respects your permissions. It doesn’t show you anything you can’t already access. It doesn’t train the model with your data. It runs inside the same Microsoft boundary your IT team signed off on years ago.
If your company is comfortable storing payroll spreadsheets and legal contracts in the cloud, then Copilot looking at an Excel workbook is not the dramatic leap people think it is.
Where does the real risk actually come from?
When you look at the stories about “AI leaks,” the common theme isn’t that the AI itself malfunctioned. It’s that someone pasted sensitive data into a free website or uploaded confidential files to a random tool “just to try it,” or used a personal AI account for company work.
That’s not an AI flaw. That’s a lack of discipline and guardrails.
If a company has no real governance, no clear permissions, no sensitivity labels, and no education on what should or shouldn’t be shared, then honestly anything is risky. Excel itself has caused more data breaches than most AI tools ever will. Email has definitely done more damage than Copilot.
People sometimes want AI to magically protect them from their own bad habits. That’s not how this works. If something is sensitive, you treat it as sensitive, no matter what tool you’re using.
What should regular Excel users actually do?
Most people reading this aren’t security officers or IT directors. You’re analysts, managers, trainers, end-users. You’re just trying to do your job without getting yelled at by security or by Copilot.
At that level, the guidance is pretty simple:
Use the tools your company gives you. If they’ve purchased Copilot for Microsoft 365 or GitHub Copilot for Business, use those. Don’t run to a free chatbot because it’s “faster” or “easier.”
Treat AI tools with the same common sense you use with email. If you wouldn’t email something to a random address, don’t paste it into a random AI tool either.
Respect permissions. Copilot can’t override them, but you can definitely override yourself by giving it something you shouldn’t be handling in the first place.
And if you’re in a role where people look to you for guidance — a trainer, a team lead, the “Excel person” everyone goes to — then it’s worth pushing for actual education and clear governance around AI usage. People aren’t doing risky things because they’re malicious; they’re doing it because no one ever explained the boundaries.
AI is not a shortcut around process. It’s just another tool in the toolbox, and it works best when the underlying data environment is clean and governed.
The big picture (and the part no one wants to say out loud)
AI isn’t the scary part. The cloud isn’t suddenly new. None of this is as dramatic as it sounds.
What’s really happening is that people are finally noticing something they’ve been doing for years — trusting cloud services with their work — now that AI is involved. But if your organization already stores HR files, payroll data, customer contracts, financial history, and sensitive documents in Microsoft 365… then Copilot is not introducing a brand-new risk category. It’s operating inside the same house as everything else.
So instead of treating AI like the unknown boogeyman, treat it like what it actually is: another cloud-based helper living in the same environment you’ve already been using.
Use the enterprise version. Follow the rules your organization already put in place. Don’t paste sensitive data into public tools. Treat AI with the same respect you should already be giving email, Teams, SharePoint, and everything else that quietly holds your entire working life.
If you do that, Copilot becomes not a threat, but a legitimately helpful assistant, one that can help you work smarter in Excel without creating a new security headache for your team.
If you’d like something you can hand to your team or stick on the virtual bulletin board, I put together the following Copilot safety guide to download. It hits the practical stuff: what’s safe, what’s not, and the habits that actually matter.
If you want to go deeper into this, not just the tech, but the skills and habits teams actually need to use Copilot responsibly and effectively… this is exactly the kind of work I help organizations with.
Happy to help you and your team build these competencies the right way.