Here’s something I don’t talk about much publicly. I have dyscalculia. Numbers don’t behave for me. They move around, they lose meaning the moment they leave context, and anything that looks like a grid of data can feel like staring at static. And I work in technology. Go figure.

But this isn’t really a post about dyscalculia. It’s about what I’ve noticed — as someone who comes from a deeply neurodivergent family, and who spends their days working inside Microsoft 365 — when a tool like Copilot lands in the hands of people whose brains have never really fitted the way work is traditionally structured.

Something interesting is happening. And I don’t think it’s being talked about enough.

The Problem Was Never Capability

Neurodivergent people are not less capable. The most creative, pattern-recognising, laterally-thinking people I know are also the ones who lose the thread in long meetings, write brilliant ideas in chaotic emails, or understand something completely but can’t produce the tidy document that proves it.

The gap has never been intelligence. It’s been translation — the daily effort of converting how your brain naturally works into the format the workplace expects back from you.

For me specifically, that means I need to see the whole picture before any individual detail makes sense. If someone walks me through something step by step, I’m lost before they finish the first step. But give me the story — the big picture, the why, the shape of the thing — and I’ve got it immediately. Always have been that way. Linear, number-heavy, hierarchical systems were not exactly built with that in mind.

I don’t need to understand the methodology. I need to understand the story the methodology is trying to tell. Those are completely different things.

What Actually Changed for Me

Let me give you some real examples rather than talk in generalities, because the specifics are where this gets interesting.

A while back I hit a wall with task management. My work was scattered everywhere — emails coming in with requests, chats in Teams, project tasks sitting in a separate tool, notes I’d made to myself that lived nowhere in particular. My brain doesn’t naturally consolidate all of that into a tidy mental list. It doesn’t queue things. It either hyperfocuses on one thing or loses track of everything simultaneously.

Real example — Copilot in Excel

I used Copilot in Excel to build myself a task dashboard. Bright colours — because I actually need to see things to process them, muted greys don’t register for me the same way. Everything categorised by project. Copilot pulled it together automatically from across my different inputs. The result was something I could look at and immediately understand where I was. Not because I’m disorganised — but because visual, colour-coded, all-in-one-place is literally how my brain reads information.

The second one is Copilot Create — specifically uploading documents into it and asking it to turn them into visual storyboards. When I’m trying to understand a methodology or get my head around someone else’s framework, a wall of text isn’t going to cut it. Being able to drop a document in and have Copilot Create turn it into something visual — a storyboard that maps out the process — is not a workaround. For a visual thinker, that’s the most direct route to understanding something. Faster than reading the document three times hoping it eventually clicks.

Real example — Copilot Create

Clients send me documentation constantly — process guides, frameworks, project briefs in all sorts of formats. I’ll drop a document into Copilot Create and ask it to build a visual storyboard of the process. Instead of hunting for the structure buried in paragraphs, I get a visual flow I can actually read and respond to. It’s transformed how quickly I can get on top of a new client’s way of working.

And the third is Copilot Notebook — which has quietly become one of the most useful things in my workflow. The idea is simple: one notebook per project, with pages inside it. I copy and paste meeting transcripts, emails, notes, reference documents — anything relevant to that project — straight into the pages. Everything lives in one place. Then I can interact with the whole notebook at once, asking Copilot questions and having it draw on everything I’ve collected. No more excavating through Teams threads or trawling back through email chains to find something someone said three weeks ago.

Real example — Copilot Notebook

I keep a notebook for each active client project. As work progresses, I add pages — meeting transcripts I’ve pasted in, email threads, briefs, decision logs. When I need to pick up a thread or answer a question, I go to the notebook and ask. Copilot can draw on everything I’ve collected across all the pages at once. It’s removed the specific anxiety of trying to hold all the moving parts of a project in my head simultaneously, which for my brain is genuinely exhausting.

Being able to go back to a recording, have it transcribed, paste it straight into a notebook page — that’s removed a specific anxiety I didn’t even fully realise I was carrying until it wasn’t there anymore.

It’s Not Just Me

A large study across 17 organisations found that 91% of employees who identify as neurodivergent or disabled consider Copilot a genuine assistive technology — not just a productivity tool, but something that actually levels the playing field in a way other software hasn’t managed to do.

91% said Copilot feels like genuine assistive technology
87% say it reduces the mental energy demanded by tasks
76% say it helps them thrive more at work

The stories behind those numbers are more interesting to me than the percentages. Someone with dyspraxia who found drafting emails genuinely stressful, now doesn’t. Someone with ADHD who can physically move around during a meeting — because that’s what their brain needs — and trust that the transcript will catch everything they’d otherwise lose. A dyslexic professional whose ideas finally match their written output, because the gap between thought and polished sentence has closed.

None of these are small things. They represent hours of daily effort that was previously going into just keeping up, now freed up for actual work.

The Blank Page Problem

One thing that comes up again and again with neurodivergent professionals is the paralysis of starting. Not laziness — the genuine cognitive block of having no visible shape to a task yet. Executive function challenges, common in ADHD and autism in particular, mean that “just start somewhere” is not the practical advice it sounds like from the outside. The starting is the hard part.

Copilot removes that block by giving you something to react to. And reacting is a completely different cognitive task than generating from nothing. If your brain works better in response mode — if you think more clearly when you’re responding to something rather than initiating from a blank slate — that distinction matters enormously.

For the first time, a mainstream workplace tool is bending toward how people actually think — rather than asking people to bend themselves to fit the tool.

Something Worth Sitting With

I’ll be honest that not everything is perfect here. There’s no dedicated neurodivergent mode — no option to simplify outputs, reduce visual noise, or adjust how information is presented based on how you process it. That would be remarkable. We’re not there yet.

And neurodivergent needs are genuinely not uniform. What helps a visual thinker with dyscalculia isn’t necessarily what helps someone with sensory processing differences. What works brilliantly for ADHD might feel overwhelming for someone who needs quiet structure. The tool is getting better at being flexible — but there’s more to go.

There’s also a bigger question underneath all of this: does a tool like Copilot help organisations actually understand their neurodivergent employees better — or does it just make it easier to not have to? Copilot helping someone work more effectively is real and valuable. Understanding why that person was struggling in the first place is a different, and arguably more important, conversation.

The Family Part

I come from a family where autism and ADHD are just part of the picture — not diagnoses that define people, just part of how different brains show up in the same household. I’ve spent a long time watching people I love work twice as hard to get to the same place as everyone else, not because they were less capable, but because the systems around them weren’t built with them in mind.

Watching those same people discover that AI tools let them finally work the way their brains actually want to work — that’s not nothing. That’s genuinely something.

I’m not suggesting Copilot solves everything or replaces the bigger conversations about inclusion that still need to happen. But for the first time in a long time, the direction feels right. The technology is being asked to adapt. And for people who’ve spent years adapting themselves to everything else, that’s a meaningful shift.