Rely on us
to solve AI
Everyone has been told AI will transform their business. Far fewer have been told what has to be true first.
We are a Microsoft-focused MSP that has been securing and running Irish businesses since 1999. We come at AI from the boring end: your tenant, your permissions, your data, your licences. That is where most Copilot rollouts quietly fail. Get it right and the productivity story takes care of itself.
Most Copilot projects don't fail at the AI. They fail at the plumbing.
Copilot and Copilot Cowork can only see what your staff can see. In most Microsoft 365 tenants, staff can see far more than anyone intended.
Over-shared SharePoint sites. A decade of files nobody owns. Guest accounts that outlived the project. Sensitivity labels that were never applied.
Switch AI on over that and you do not get productivity. You get an incident.
The other common outcome is quieter and more expensive. Licences bought, nobody trained, usage flatlines by week six, and the renewal conversation gets awkward.
We deal with both. NTES has been an Irish managed service provider since 1999, working with businesses in Limerick, Dublin and across Ireland and the UK. We approach AI the way we approach every other part of your infrastructure: secure it first, then make it useful.
How we work: Assess, Deploy, Adopt
1. Assess
AI and Copilot readiness assessment
A fixed-scope engagement that tells you where you actually stand. We run a basic readiness assessment free of charge, so you can see the state of your tenant before spending anything.
We review your Microsoft 365 tenant and licensing, audit data oversharing and permissions across SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, and analyse gaps in sensitivity labelling, retention and DLP. We check your identity, conditional access and MFA posture, run a use-case workshop with your team, and model the cost of Copilot licences and Copilot Credits.
Deliverable: a readiness scorecard and costed roadmap you can take to your board. Typically two to three weeks.
2. Deploy
Secure rollout and governance
Fix what the assessment found, then switch it on properly.
We remediate oversharing, orphaned data and stale access, then apply sensitivity labels, DLP and retention policies that fit how you actually work. We configure Copilot and agent controls in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and set spend limits and usage alerts at tenant, group and user level before anyone touches a credit. Restricted SharePoint Search and staged pilot groups keep the first phase small and controlled.
Deliverable: a governed, monitored Copilot environment with a live pilot group, full audit logging and reporting. Typically four to eight weeks.
3. Adopt
Training, agents and measurable value
Licences do not create value. Habits do.
We deliver role-based training for finance, sales, operations, admin and leadership rather than one generic session, and build prompt and workflow libraries around your real processes. A champion programme keeps capability in-house. We enable Copilot Cowork safely, covering approval checkpoints and what not to hand over, and build custom agents for repeatable jobs such as onboarding, tender responses, reporting and ticket triage.
Deliverable: measured adoption, controlled spend and a clear line from licence cost to hours saved, with monthly reporting and quarterly reviews. Available as a managed service alongside your existing NTES agreement.
Microsoft 365 Copilot, deployed by the people who already run your tenant
Microsoft 365 Copilot lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, and grounds its answers in your organisation’s own email, files, meetings and chats. That is what makes it powerful, and exactly why the underlying permissions model matters so much.
Because NTES already manages Microsoft 365 estates for businesses across Ireland and the UK, we are not guessing. We know your licensing, identity setup, data and security posture before we start.
What we handle
Licence selection and cost modelling, including an honest answer on whether Copilot Chat gets you there for less. Tenant preparation and data hygiene. Pilot design, success measurement and phased rollout.
Security and compliance alignment, with GDPR and EU data residency considered from day one. End-user training and ongoing support through the same NTES helpdesk you already use.
Why your permissions model decides whether this works
Copilot can only see what the person using it can already see. In most tenants that is far more than anyone intended: over-shared SharePoint sites, files nobody owns, guest accounts that outlived the project.
Switching Copilot on over that does not create a new risk so much as make an existing one instantly searchable. We audit and remediate before anyone is licensed.
Copilot or Copilot Chat, and what each costs
Not every organisation needs the full Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. For some teams, Copilot Chat plus a couple of well-chosen automations delivers most of the value at a fraction of the cost.
We model both against your actual usage before you commit, and tell you plainly if the cheaper option is the right one.
Copilot Cowork: from asking to doing
Copilot Cowork is Microsoft’s agentic layer for Microsoft 365, generally available worldwide since June 2026 and built in partnership with Anthropic. Where standard Copilot answers a question, Cowork takes a goal, breaks it into a plan, and works through it in the background across your mail, files, meetings and data, checking in for approval before it applies changes.
In practice that means triaging a week’s calendar and rescheduling conflicts, building a client meeting pack from scattered sources, compiling researched analysis into a memo and workbook, or assembling a launch plan with the supporting documents.
It is off by default, and that is deliberate
An admin has to decide when to enable Cowork, who gets access, which plugins are permitted, whether browser use is allowed, and what the spending limits are.
Those decisions belong in a governance plan, not in a support ticket six weeks after the fact. NTES sets that policy with you before anyone is switched on.
It is billed on consumption, not per seat
A Microsoft 365 Copilot user licence is the entry ticket, but Cowork usage is metered separately in Copilot Credits, priced on four inputs: model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime.
A light task and a heavy multi-source research task can differ by an order of magnitude. That variability is the single biggest thing that catches finance teams out.
The controls are good. Spending limits at tenant, group and user level, customisable usage alerts, per-task pricing visible to the user, and a choice between pay-as-you-go and a committed-volume discount. They simply have to be configured before anyone starts, not after the first invoice.
How NTES helps
We enable Cowork against a defined policy rather than by default, and set spend caps, alerts and access tiers at tenant, group and user level before go-live. We run a measured pilot to establish your real cost per outcome, then advise on pay-as-you-go versus committed volume.
We configure plugin and browser-use policy, align Cowork with your audit, eDiscovery and insider-risk controls, and identify the workflows genuinely worth delegating alongside the ones that are not.
We train your staff on approval checkpoints, verification and what not to hand over, then report monthly on credit consumption, usage by team and value delivered.
Frequently asked questions about AI, Copilot and Cowork
The questions Irish business owners and IT managers ask us most often about Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Cowork and AI consultancy.
Do we need Microsoft 365 Copilot licences to use Copilot Cowork?
Yes. A Microsoft 365 Copilot user subscription licence is the prerequisite. Cowork usage is then billed separately on consumption via Copilot Credits, so the licence alone does not cover it. NTES models both costs before you commit.
How much will Copilot Cowork actually cost us?
It depends on how it is used. The work an agent performs is what gets metered, not the number of people with access. Microsoft publishes an estimator, but the ranges are wide and your real figure depends on your task mix. That is why we run a controlled pilot with spend caps first and report on actual consumption before you scale. There is also a choice between pay-as-you-go and committing to a volume up front for a discount, and we advise once we have your pilot data.
Is our data safe? Does Copilot train the AI models on it?
Copilot and Cowork operate inside your Microsoft 365 trust boundary. Your existing identity, permissions and policies apply, sensitivity labels are inherited through to outputs, and prompts, responses and generated files are covered by audit logging, eDiscovery and your retention policies. The bigger risk in practice is not the model. It is users being able to reach data they should not. That is the first thing we audit.
We're a small business in Ireland. Is Microsoft Copilot relevant to us?
Often yes, but rarely in the form the marketing suggests. Smaller organisations usually get more from a couple of well-chosen automations plus Copilot Chat than from a full licence rollout. The readiness assessment is where we work that out, and we will tell you if the answer is no.
What does the EU AI Act mean for us if we deploy Copilot?
Deploying Copilot generally puts your organisation in the position of a deployer rather than a provider, which carries lighter but real obligations, mainly around staff AI literacy, transparency and human oversight. We build that into the policy work. This is general guidance, not legal advice.
Can you do this if NTES isn't our current IT provider?
Yes. The basic readiness assessment is free and stands alone, and you are free to take the findings elsewhere. The deeper fixed-scope engagement is chargeable, and we quote it only once the basic assessment shows it is worth doing. Plenty of clients start there.
Why Irish businesses choose NTES for AI
AI is new. Running secure Microsoft environments for Irish businesses is not. We have been doing that since 1999.
Years in business
25+
Serving clients across Ireland, the UK and Europe since 1999.
ISO 27001 certified
ISO
AI introduces new data risks. We assess them against a standard we are independently audited on.
Client retention
98%
We are an extension of your team, not a project that ends at go-live.
Start with the honest version
No pilot fatigue, no six-figure transformation programme. The basic readiness assessment is free: we tell you where you stand, what it would cost, and whether it is worth doing at all.
NTES works with businesses across Limerick, Dublin, Ireland and the UK. If you’re weighing up Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Cowork or AI more broadly, we’ll give you a straight answer.