Microsoft

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AI

The AI Bill Has Found Its Finance Department

Meta spent more than a hundred million dollars on a single AI coding tool in a twenty-eight day window, then told its engineers to stop. Microsoft cut the same tool's per-employee allowance by ninety per cent. The experiment phase is over. The audit has begun.

An empty open-plan office with two rows of pale desks running the length of the room, each with a monitor, keyboard and desk phone, under suspended linear lights and a dark ceiling.
The Numbers

$30 a Seat and a Meter Behind It. What Microsoft's One-App Copilot Actually Costs a Buyer.

Microsoft folded chat, an agent, a code builder and native Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single Copilot application on 25 September, and split the bill in two: a flat per-user subscription for everyday use, and a usage meter denominated in Copilot Credits for everything agentic. Thirty million paid seats out of a commercial base above 450 million is the number the launch is aimed at.