Enterprise Copilot Users - Deployed AI With Disabled File Access

You got the email that said the company had "deployed AI." You opened the tool. You asked it to do the one thing that would actually save you an afternoon — open the real file, the messy one with the tabs nobody documents — and it couldn't. It could chat. It could summarize what you pasted in. It could, if you are feeling bleak, write you a short poem about reconciliation.It couldn't touch anything real. So you closed the tab. And somewhere in the closing of that tab you decided the problem was you. Maybe you weren't using it right. Maybe everyone else got the trick. Here's the number that ends that thought. Forrester looked at the Copilot rollout — likely the same one you were handed — and found roughly 70% of the Fortune 500 are licensed for it, while only 20–30% of those paid seats get used in a given week. The seats are lit up and empty. Not because the people are slow. Because the tool was fenced — the connectors to your files disabled, the access withheld, the useful settings left off by people thinking about risk, not about your Tuesday. You did not get bad luck. You got the default. The tool isn't weak. It's locked. And a locked door is not a verdict on the person standing in front of it. I'm writing a book about what you do anyway — it's called "The Meantime," out early August. Until then I'm gathering the people doing this work into one room: the Village, on Substack chat. Pull up a chair; the coffee, against all odds, survived. → Join the Village (link below)