Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached

Microsoft announced its Copilot super app alongside a revamped pricing structure, which entails ongoing subscription fees plus additional charges for advanced AI functionalities. The company integrated Copilot into a singular AI hub encompassing chat, Office software, coding, and increasingly self-governing agents. The new pricing scheme combines a User Subscription License (USL) per user monthly and Usage-Based Billing (UBB), depending on the AI's workload.

The USL covers core features like Copilot Chat and integration with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Advanced AI, including agent-driven tasks such as coworking, coding, autopilot, and new experiences in SharePoint, operates using UBB, which is added to the subscription cost. Microsoft provides credits as the standard currency for billed usage, varying based on the AI model, context retrieval, task duration, and invoked tools.

Organizations can control usage through billing policies, setting user and organizational spending limits, alerts, and monitoring through the Microsoft 365 admin center. Analysts advise a shift in mindset for businesses to adapt to potentially variable costs, especially for complex, autonomous agent tasks. Microsoft's pricing strategy has faced scrutiny from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which launched an investigation in July regarding proper customer communication when adding Copilot to Microsoft 365 subscriptions and transitioning them to pricier plans.