The number that explains Friday's announcement is not a price. It is 30 million — the paid Copilot seats Microsoft reported as of July, up from 20 million in April — set against a commercial Microsoft 365 base the company put above 450 million in January.
Call it 6.7 per cent. After nearly three years of selling an artificial-intelligence add-on into the largest installed base in enterprise software, Microsoft has converted roughly one desk in fifteen. Everything in the new Copilot — the consolidation, the repackaging, the second billing model — is addressed to the other fourteen.
What was announced
Microsoft published the details itself on 25 September, in a post by Jared Spataro, its chief marketing officer for AI at Work. The new Copilot is a single application with three parts.
Home is the entry point. It merges what were two experiences: Chat, for "quick questions, lookups, draft-creation," and Cowork, which takes a delegated task end to end. Word, Excel and PowerPoint run inside it — "Office in Copilot" — so a document can be produced and edited without leaving the assistant.
Code lets people who are not developers describe a small internal tool in plain language and have it built: persistent desktop widgets, dashboards, cloud-hosted internal apps. It runs on GitHub Copilot technology, in sandboxed environments inside the customer's own tenant.
Autopilot is a standing agent. It has its own identity and its own workspace, it appears in Teams and Outlook, and it is meant to chase threads and handle recurring work without being prompted each time. Scout, the always-on agent Microsoft introduced in June, is being retired; customers create named Autopilots instead.
The rollout is staged. Home and Code reach Microsoft's Frontier early-access programme within weeks, with a Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro preview later in 2026. Autopilot expands to private preview at the end of this month. Consumer usage-based billing arrives later in the year.
The bill, in two halves
This is the part a buyer should read twice, because it is a change in structure, not in list price.
Microsoft now describes two kinds of AI spending. The first is the Copilot user subscription licence: a flat monthly per-employee fee giving "broad access at a predictable per-person price," covering Copilot Chat, the assistant inside the Office applications, Outlook and Teams, and a set of ready-made agents. The second is usage-based billing, charged in Copilot Credits, which Microsoft calls "a shared currency that aggregates AI operations across the platform." Cowork, Code, Autopilot and the frontier models sit on that side.
Spataro's framing of the metered half is worth quoting exactly, because it is the sales argument: "That second cost isn't overhead. It's capital, invested to build capability."
The list prices on Microsoft's own plans page, retrieved on Saturday, are $9.99 a month for individuals; $23.50 per user per month for business, paid yearly; and $30.00 per user per month for enterprise, paid yearly. Microsoft Learn's licensing page, dated 17 September, adds a detail that matters for renewals: Microsoft 365 E7 now "includes Microsoft Copilot" in the base plan rather than as an add-on. It also preserves a distinction buyers routinely miss — web-grounded Copilot Chat is included free with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, while work-grounded chat, the kind that can see the tenant's own data, requires a paid Copilot licence.
Microsoft does not publish a dollar figure for a Copilot Credit on any of the pages consulted. It does publish the consumption rates, in the Copilot Studio billing documentation updated on 14 September, and those are specific enough to model.
A scripted answer costs 1 credit. A generative answer costs 2. An agent action — a trigger, a topic transition, a step of deep reasoning — costs 5. Grounding a response in the tenant's Microsoft Graph costs 10. A hundred agent-flow actions cost 13. Premium text and generative AI tools, the tier Microsoft attaches to advanced reasoning, cost 10 credits per 1,000 tokens. Voice runs 10 credits a minute on the classic tier, 35 on generative, 75 on premium generative. Microsoft's own worked example: a tenant-grounded agent answering one complex prompt consumes 12 credits.
For comparison, GitHub — the other half of the same company — does publish a rate. On its plans page, "1 AI credit = $0.01 USD," with Copilot Pro at $10 a month including $15 of credits, Pro+ at $39 including $70, and Max at $100 including $200.
Read the inclusions, then read the exclusions
Microsoft's documentation says agent usage is included at no charge for staff who already hold a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, in employee-facing scenarios, where the agent runs under that licensed user's identity. That is a real concession and it is the single strongest reason for a Copilot-licensed shop to keep its agent work inside the tenant.
Three qualifications sit in the same document.
The inclusion is "limited to fair usage limits," and Microsoft "reserves the right to update the limits as the product evolves, and new usage patterns emerge." No number is attached to fair use.
Computer-using agents — the class that drives a desktop or a browser on the user's behalf, which is precisely the capability most enterprises are now piloting — are explicitly not included in the user subscription licence. They bill at the agent-action rate.
And there is a hard stop. When a tenant reaches 125 per cent of its prepaid credit capacity, custom agents are disabled. Ongoing conversations finish; subsequent invocations are rejected with "This agent is currently unavailable. It has reached its usage limit." Agent flows are blocked at 100 per cent rather than 125. Usage-based services ship switched off by default and administrators set spending caps, which is the right default and also an acknowledgement of what the meter can do.
What it replaces, and what it does not
Take a 1,000-seat company on enterprise Copilot. That is $30.00 a seat a month paid yearly — $360 a seat a year, $360,000 in total, before a single credit is consumed.
Now suppose the same company also pays for a rival assistant, which many do. A Claude Enterprise seat lists at $20 a month billed annually, plus usage at API rates; a Claude Team standard seat is $20 a seat billed annually or $25 monthly, with a premium seat at $100 and $125 respectively. Add Enterprise across the same 1,000 desks and the stack is $600 a seat a year plus two variable components.
Microsoft's pitch is that the second subscription becomes unnecessary, because the frontier models are inside Copilot: OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Claude Fable are selectable, with an Auto mode routing each request. Satya Nadella made the argument in terms of leverage rather than convenience — customers should hold "a private eval that you can hill climb on and substitute a model," and Copilot is, in his phrase, a "new OS for work."
The buyer's correction is that those models sit on the metered side of the bill. Cancelling a $20 seat and switching on usage-based access to the same model family does not remove the cost; it converts a fixed, forecastable, negotiable line item into a consumption charge whose unit price Microsoft has not published. Whether that is cheaper depends entirely on how heavily the seat was being used, and heavy users are exactly the people who justified the second subscription in the first place.
Jacob Andreou, the executive vice-president for Copilot, put Microsoft's differentiation on security rather than price. "Sending your most sensitive files... into... a VM was a complete nonstarter," he said, of the local-virtual-machine approach taken by Anthropic's Cowork. On agents generally he was franker than launch events usually allow: "The hallmark of an amazing, long-running agent is autonomy and flexibility. That is the same thing that makes them absolutely terrifying to an IT admin."
What a buyer should actually do
Four things, in order.
Establish what you already own. It is the same inventory problem that runs through the software estate generally, and it has the same answer. If your base plan is Microsoft 365 E7, Copilot is in it. If it is E3 or E5, it is an add-on. If you have any eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, web-grounded Copilot Chat is already free and some share of what staff are buying elsewhere is being bought twice.
Price the meter before enabling it. The credit rates are published; a fortnight of agent logs will tell you how many generative answers, agent actions and grounded responses a real workflow consumes. Multiply by the rate card, then ask your reseller for the dollar value of a credit in writing. It is not on the pricing page.
Treat the fair-use clause as a repricing option, not a footnote. Microsoft has reserved the right to set limits it has not yet defined, on the capability it is using to justify the flat fee.
And do not cancel the second subscription in the same quarter you turn on the meter. Run both for one quarter, measure, and decide with numbers. The company that announced consolidation on Friday has not yet published the price of the thing it is consolidating into.
The product description, the three-part structure and the two commercial models are from Microsoft's own announcement, "Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot," by Jared Spataro, published at blogs.microsoft.com on 25 September 2026, and from "Building the system for AI at work," 23 September 2026, which sets out the user subscription licence and Copilot Credits. List prices are from Microsoft's Copilot plans page at microsoft.com/microsoft-365-copilot, retrieved 26 September 2026. Licensing prerequisites, the Microsoft 365 E7 inclusion and the distinction between web-based and work-based Copilot Chat are from Microsoft Learn, "License Options for Microsoft Copilot," page dated 17 September 2026. Copilot Credit billing rates, the fair-use language, the exclusion of computer-using agents and the 125 per cent overage threshold are from Microsoft Learn, "Billing rates and management — Microsoft Copilot Studio," updated 14 September 2026. Anthropic's seat prices are from claude.com/pricing and GitHub Copilot's plan prices and the $0.01 credit unit from github.com/features/copilot/plans, both retrieved 26 September 2026. Seat counts, the discontinuation of Scout, the availability timetable and the quotations from Jacob Andreou and Satya Nadella are as reported by GeekWire, "Microsoft unveils all-in-one Copilot app, taking on Anthropic and OpenAI in new push to boost adoption," 25 September 2026. Microsoft does not publish a dollar value for a Copilot Credit on any of the pages consulted.
Topics technologyaienterprise softwaremicrosoftprocurementpricingagents
