You know that moment when you’re searching for something at work and you get 47 results? You click through them. Nothing’s quite what you need. You refine your search. More clicking. More scrolling. Fifteen minutes later, you finally find the right document. And it was on the third page of results the whole time.
The Problem Nobody’s Solving (Until Now)
Knowledge workers spend a shocking amount of time just finding information. A 2024 study found that knowledge workers spend about 20% of their day searching for documents and information. That’s one day a week. Per person. Per organisation, it’s thousands of hours wasted on document hunting.
Search is broken. We’ve pretended it’s fine for years. We’re just… used to it being broken.
Microsoft just quietly started fixing it. And most people haven’t even noticed.
What Are Glance Cards Anyway?
When you search for something in your Microsoft 365 tenant now, you don’t just get a list of filenames. You get a summary. Creation date, key insights, relevant highlights—basically, enough information to know whether it’s the right document before you click on it.
It sounds small. It’s not.
Instead of opening 10 documents to find the one you need, you scan five summaries and open the right one. That’s 80% of your search time gone.
But Wait, There’s More
The really useful bit? Your chat history surfaces in search results. So if you had a conversation with Copilot about quarterly financial forecasts six weeks ago, and you need that information again—it shows up in your search results. You don’t have to remember you talked to Copilot about it. You don’t have to dig through your chat history. It just… appears.
You can filter results by conversation, document type, date range. The experience feels less like searching in the dark and more like having an assistant who remembers where you found stuff before.
Why This Matters for Your Team
Let’s be practical. Every hour someone saves searching is an hour they can spend on actual work. For a team of 20 people, if this feature saves each person just 2 hours a week, that’s 160 hours recovered annually. For a team of 100, it’s 800 hours.
That’s not nothing.
But more importantly, it changes how people work. Instead of abandoning a search because it’s not finding what they need, they try a different approach. They find more context. They understand their own information better. Information that would have stayed buried becomes useful.
The Sales Team Example
Here’s a real scenario: a sales manager needs to prepare for a client meeting. She needs the original contract, the latest statement of work, and the customer communication log. Old way: she searches three times, opens documents she doesn’t need, asks a colleague if they remember where something was filed. 20 minutes.
New way: she searches once. The results include a summary of the contract (dates, key terms, pricing), the SOW preview, and it suggests the email thread where that customer concern was discussed. She scans the summaries, opens the three documents she actually needs. 3 minutes.
And if she asks Copilot “summarise our history with this client,” the summary itself appears in her next search. She doesn’t lose it.
The Catch (There’s Always a Catch)
This only works if your data is organised reasonably well. If your SharePoint is chaos—documents named “Final_FINAL_v3_ACTUAL,” stored randomly, inconsistently tagged—then search summaries won’t help much.
But if you’ve got decent information governance, even mediocre organisation becomes functional. Because Copilot’s summary shows what’s actually in the document, not just the filename or metadata.
What This Means for Your Organisation
If you’re deploying Copilot, this feature alone justifies the investment. Not because it’s flashy. Because it’s useful every single day for every person who searches for anything.
And the kicker? It gets better the more people use it. The more conversations happen with Copilot, the richer the search context becomes. Six months in, people stop thinking about “searching” and just start asking for what they need—whether they’re querying documents directly or asking Copilot.
The Reality Check
You don’t need to do anything special to get this. You don’t need new tools or new processes. If you’re using Microsoft 365 and you’ve got Copilot enabled, search just gets better. It happens automatically.
The only prerequisite is reasonable data governance. Clean up your permissions. Keep your documents reasonably organised. Don’t name everything “Final_v3.” That’s it.
Do that, and your team gets hours back every week. They spend less time hunting and more time thinking. And honestly, in a world where time is everyone’s scarcest resource, that’s pretty valuable.
Want to talk about how to prepare your organisation for better search and discovery? We help teams get their data house in order so they can actually benefit from these features.
