ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini: which should your business choose?

Short answer: If you run Microsoft 365, Copilot is the natural choice. If you run Google Workspace, it is Gemini. ChatGPT fits when you use both, or want an assistant that sits outside the office suite. But before you choose: all three show employees everything they have access to, so any mess in your permissions becomes visible at once.

The three are more alike than the marketing suggests

On what worries most leaders, the answer is the same for all three. None of them trains its models on business data in the business editions. All three respect the permissions you have already set, so an employee only sees documents they could already open.

Note that this applies to business plans. Free and personal plans have different terms, and that is where most data leaks happen in practice.

Where they actually differ

	ChatGPT	Copilot	Gemini
Lives in	Its own app	Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams	Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive
Data stored in the EEA	Enterprise only	Yes, including Norway	Enterprise Plus only
Automatic user provisioning	Enterprise only	Yes, via Entra	Yes
Norwegian	Listed	Bokmål	Listed

“Listed” means the vendor names Norwegian as a supported language. Microsoft lists Bokmål only. None of them says how well Norwegian works, and none mentions Nynorsk.

Choose by where your documents live

Microsoft 365. Copilot works inside the tools people already use, and draws on SharePoint, Teams and email without extra setup. Microsoft stores data for Norwegian customers in Norway, and offers guaranteed local storage as an add-on. That add-on requires every paid licence to be covered.

Google Workspace. Gemini sits in the side panel of Gmail, Docs and Drive, and follows Workspace permissions. Restricting processing to the EU requires Enterprise Plus or a separate add-on.

Both, or neither. ChatGPT connects to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Google Drive, and is not tied to one office suite. The catch is that EEA storage and automatic user provisioning only come with Enterprise, not Business.

The biggest risk is not the tool

Copilot and Gemini show an employee everything they have access to. That sounds safe until you find out how much people have access to. A folder of salary data shared with “everyone in the company” 3 years ago is suddenly one question away.

Norway’s Data Protection Authority tested Copilot with NTNU and found that weaknesses in the digital foundation are amplified by the tool. The Norwegian government’s guide to AI assistants says the same: Copilot requires good data classification and a degree of order in your own house, and sensitive folders must be shielded.

Fix the permissions before you roll out, not after.

How to decide

Start with the office suite you have. It settles most of it.
Check storage requirements. If data must stay in the EEA, check which plan actually delivers that.
Clean up permissions on the most sensitive areas before rollout.
Test on real tasks with a small group, and measure the result instead of going on gut feeling. How to do that is in the article on evaluating AI systems.
Carry out a data protection impact assessment if the use is high risk, and put a data processing agreement in place. Both are in the Norwegian government’s guide.

What they cost per user is in the pricing article.

Sources

All sources checked on 14 September 2026.