A practical guide to setting up your Confluence Copilot in 2025

If your company uses Confluence, you know it’s supposed to be a goldmine of information. Project plans, technical docs, meeting notes, HR policies, it’s all in there, meant to be your single source of truth. But let’s be real, finding the exact piece of information you need can feel like digging for treasure without a map.

This is the whole idea behind a Confluence copilot: an AI assistant that can instantly search, pull together, and answer questions using your company’s knowledge.

The thing is, not all copilots are built the same. Many options involve complicated setups and, even worse, introduce some pretty serious security risks that could expose sensitive information. This guide will walk you through what’s out there, explain the common headaches, and show you a much more straightforward and secure way to get it done.

What is a Confluence copilot?

A Confluence copilot isn’t a specific brand name, but a type of tool that connects an AI-powered chatbot to all your Confluence pages and spaces. The goal is simple: let your team ask questions in plain English, like "What’s our policy on parental leave?" or "Give me the highlights from the Q3 project retro," and get immediate answers pulled directly from your documents.

It’s supposed to close the gap between having information written down and actually being able to use it. Instead of digging through spaces and pages, your team can get answers sent right to the apps they already use every day, like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

The main options you’ll see are Atlassian’s own AI, Rovo, and connectors for big platforms like Microsoft 365 Copilot. They’re all powerful in their own right, but each comes with a unique set of quirks and limitations you should know about before you dive in.

Setting up a Confluence copilot: The usual methods and their hidden problems

Hooking up your Confluence knowledge to an AI sounds simple on paper, but the reality is often a lot messier and comes with some serious headaches. Let’s break down the most common approach and the issues that pop up time and again.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot connector approach

Microsoft provides a Graph Connector that can index your Confluence content (both Cloud and On-premises) to feed it into Microsoft 365 Copilot. At first glance, this seems like a perfect way to bring your wiki into the Microsoft world you already live in.

But getting it up and running is a heavy lift for your admins:

• You need to be a full Microsoft 365 admin just to get started.

• If your Confluence is on-premise, you have to install and configure something called a Graph Connector Agent (GCA) on a local server.

• You’ll have to set up authentication using protocols like OAuth 2.0, which means creating application links and managing credentials between Atlassian and Microsoft.

So while it’s a solid tool for companies already deep in the Microsoft suite, it’s a far cry from a simple plug-and-play setup.

This video shows how you can set up the connection between Confluence and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The biggest problem: Security risks and permission syncing

The number one complaint people have with connectors like Microsoft’s is how they manage permissions. Users in a recent Atlassian Community thread flagged a pretty scary flaw: the connector scans and indexes all the content using the admin’s wide-open permissions, not the permissions of the person asking the question.

What does that mean? A junior employee could ask Copilot a question and get an answer sourced from a confidential, management-only HR space they should never see. This isn’t just a minor bug; it’s a huge security hole that could easily lead to data leaks. To make matters worse, Microsoft’s own documentation admits that permission changes often only get updated during a full crawl, which might only happen once a day. This creates a dangerous lag where people could access information they’re no longer supposed to see.

A simpler, safer solution

The technical headaches and security nightmares of traditional connectors are exactly why a new approach is needed. Some tools, like eesel AI, were designed from day one to be both incredibly simple and secure.

Instead of a multi-day project that ties up your developers, eesel offers a one-click Confluence integration. It’s genuinely self-serve, so you can connect your knowledge and have a working AI assistant in minutes, not months.

This workflow illustrates the simple, self-serve implementation process for the eesel AI Confluence copilot.

More importantly, eesel AI is built to respect your existing Confluence permissions. It doesn’t just scan everything with an admin account. It understands and enforces page and space restrictions for every single user, ensuring that people only get answers from content they already have permission to view. This completely removes the risk of accidental data exposure and gives you the peace of mind to roll out an AI assistant to your whole company.

Key features to look for in a Confluence copilot

When you’re looking at different tools to turn your Confluence wiki into an AI knowledge source, there are a few things you absolutely need to look for to make sure it’s useful, safe, and not a pain to manage.

Granular permission handling and security

As we just saw, this is the big one. Your AI tool has to mirror Confluence’s user-level permissions perfectly. Anything less is a recipe for disaster.

Feature	Microsoft Copilot Connector	eesel AI
Permission Model	Indexes based on the admin account used for setup, which can lead to data leaks.	Natively respects user-level space and page restrictions, ensuring data is secure.
Permission Sync Speed	Updates can be delayed up to 24 hours until the next full crawl.	Permissions are handled in real-time, preventing access gaps.
Setup Security	Requires granting broad permissions between Microsoft 365 and Atlassian.	Simple, secure OAuth flow with tightly scoped permissions.

Seamless integrations with your entire tech stack

A Confluence copilot is most useful when it shows up where your team is already working. If it only lives in one app, you’re just creating another information silo. The best tools bring Confluence knowledge right into your daily workflow, answering questions directly in Slack or Microsoft Teams. They can also arm your support agents with instant answers inside help desks like Zendesk or Jira Service Management. Ideally, a tool can also pull in knowledge from other places like Google Docs and Notion to create one unified brain for the whole company.

A screenshot showing the eesel AI Confluence copilot answering a team member's question directly within Slack.

The power to test with confidence

How can you be sure your new AI assistant is actually ready for prime time? Pushing a new tool out to the whole company without testing it first is a gamble. This is where a simulation mode is a huge help.

eesel AI gives you a powerful simulation environment to test your setup on historical data. You can see precisely how the AI would have answered past questions from your team, measure its accuracy, and tweak its behavior before anyone in the company interacts with it. This risk-free approach helps you build confidence and makes for a much smoother launch, which is something you don’t often get with other platforms.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which helps test the Confluence copilot's accuracy before launch.

The Confluence copilot landscape: Pricing and platform considerations

The cost and long-term commitment for a Confluence copilot can differ wildly depending on the ecosystem you decide to buy into.

Atlassian Rovo: A pricing breakdown

Atlassian’s built-in AI solution, Rovo, comes bundled with its more expensive plans. To get its AI-powered search and other features, you need to be on a paid Confluence subscription.

Here’s a quick breakdown of Confluence Cloud’s pricing:

Plan	Price (per user/month, annual)	Key AI Features
Free	$0 (up to 10 users)	None
Standard	$5.16	Rovo Search, Chat, and Agents (with usage limits)
Premium	$9.73	More Rovo AI credits and indexed objects per user
Enterprise	Contact Sales	Highest Rovo AI credits and indexed objects per user

Pricing is based on information from Atlassian’s pricing page and may change.

The main catch here is vendor lock-in. Rovo is built to live and breathe inside the Atlassian world, which isn’t great if you want to get answers into other tools like Microsoft Teams.

The true cost of Microsoft 365 Copilot

The Microsoft Confluence connector is technically part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, but using it requires a license for Microsoft 365 Copilot. That license costs an extra $30 per user, per month, on top of what you already pay for your Microsoft 365 subscription. When you add in the admin time for setup and ongoing maintenance, plus the potential security risks, the total cost gets pretty high, pretty fast.

eesel AI: Transparent and predictable pricing

In contrast, eesel AI has a simple, all-inclusive pricing model. All integrations, including the one for Confluence, are part of every plan. You pay a flat fee based on how much you use it, with no weird per-user or per-resolution charges tacked on.

This straightforward model makes it easy to budget and scale. You can start with a monthly plan and cancel whenever you want, giving you flexibility that you just don’t get with long-term enterprise contracts from the big vendors.

Choose a Confluence copilot that’s simple, secure, and flexible

A Confluence copilot can completely change how your team finds and uses information, helping everyone work faster and smarter. But getting there can be a minefield of complicated setups and glaring security flaws, especially with some of the mainstream options.

You shouldn’t have to pick between having powerful AI and keeping your company’s data safe. A modern solution should be easy to set up, respect your existing permissions without any compromises, and fit right in with the tools your team already uses.

By prioritizing a self-serve setup, rock-solid security, and platform flexibility, you can roll out an AI assistant that actually helps your team without creating new problems.

Ready to unlock your Confluence knowledge the easy and secure way? Get started with eesel AI for free and you can have your first AI assistant running in minutes.