Microsoft 365 Copilot is a general-purpose generative AI assistant built into Microsoft's Office software, not a policing-specific product. Its use in English policing follows the 2025 launch of the Police Digital Service's National Police Capabilities Environment, an Azure-based platform intended to give forces shared access to cloud tools, Copilot among them, for tasks like report drafting, case-file summarising and general administrative work.

Its most consequential documented use to date is also a cautionary one: Copilot fabricated a non-existent football match while West Midlands Police prepared a public-order intelligence assessment in late 2025, and that fabricated detail fed into a real decision to bar away fans from a fixture. The force's chief constable initially told a parliamentary committee no AI had been used at all, before correcting the record. See the tracker for the full account and its sources.

Because Copilot is a general assistant rather than a tool built and validated for policing tasks, there's no dedicated accuracy testing regime for this use case the way there is for, say, facial recognition matching thresholds. Its use in operational report writing has prompted comparisons to earlier controversies over AI-assisted police report tools, tracked separately under "police reports" as a subject.