Bo’s Blog

Microsoft Copilot and the MCP Integration Experience — A Mess

16th March 2026

When people talk about the best AI models right now, the conversation usually centres on Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini -- with Grok increasingly earning a mention. But enterprise AI is a different landscape entirely. Inside large organisations with strict security and compliance requirements, the shortlist shrinks fast. Many firms effectively have one sanctioned option: Microsoft Copilot. It's deeply embedded in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that most enterprises already run on, which makes it the path of least resistance for IT departments -- regardless of whether it's actually the best tool for the job.

Today I was working through the process of connecting our MCP server to Copilot. It did not go well.

The documentation is ambiguous to the point of being genuinely misleading. The UI is cluttered and poorly thought through. And the settings -- where do I even start. Here's a question that should have a simple answer: how many distinct Copilot platforms does Microsoft currently operate? The answer, as best as I can tell, is at least three. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and GitHub Copilot all exist as separate products with separate configurations, separate interfaces, and separate documentation -- and the lines between them are blurry enough that figuring out which one you're actually supposed to be working in is itself a non-trivial task. For a developer trying to do something as specific as MCP integration, this fragmentation is a genuine obstacle.

This is what Microsoft looks like right now from the inside -- a company sitting on an enormous pile of products that don't quite talk to each other, held together by inertia and enterprise lock-in rather than coherent design. The AI wrapper is new; the organisational chaos underneath it is not.