Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached

Microsoft has unveiled its shiny new Copilot super app alongside an evolved" pricing model to go with it, which means that customers will keep paying for a subscription and then cough up more when they want the really clever stuff. The company outlined the changes alongside its expanded vision for Copilot, which is being turned into a single AI work hub spanning chat, Office apps, coding, and increasingly autonomous agents. Microsoft calls the new pricing setup a combination of a User Subscription License (USL), charged per user per month, and Usage-Based Billing (UBB), which charges according to how much work Copilot does. The regular subscription pays for what Microsoft calls Everyday AI." That's Copilot Chat, plus Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Users can pick which model they want, or leave it to Auto, which chooses based on accuracy, speed, and cost. Then there's Advanced AI." Customers wanting Copilot to get stuck into more compute-hungry agentic work will also need usage-based billing (UBB). Microsoft says that this includes Cowork, Code, Autopilot, new agentic experiences in SharePoint, and frontier models including Astra and Fable. Crucially, those UBB charges are on top of the user subscription, not an alternative to it. The meter itself isn't entirely new. Microsoft has already used consumption-based pricing for some AI services, including Cowork, and Copilot Credits provide the common currency for eligible services billed by usage. What's changing is how central that model will become as Microsoft pushes Copilot further into agent territory. Exactly how many credits disappear depends on what Copilot is asked to do. Microsoft says consumption can vary by the models used, how much context it has to retrieve, how long the task runs, and which tools it calls. More complicated, multi-step jobs can therefore chew through more credits than simpler tasks. Redmond isn't leaving admins completely at the mercy of an enthusiastic employee and a hungry AI agent. Usage-based features have to be enabled through a billing policy, and administrators can impose organization- and user-level spending limits, configure alerts, and monitor consumption from the Microsoft 365 admin center. That will require a mindset shift for organizations used to knowing what their Copilot seats will cost, according to Simon Baxter at analyst TechMarketView. Customers that want these agentic capabilities will have to adopt a consumption mindset, along with the cost governance that goes with it," Baxter said. He pointed to Microsoft's new FinOps tools for managing spending policies, credit approvals, and model access as evidence that Redmond knows customers will need help keeping tabs on the meter. Code and Autopilot could be particularly interesting for whoever holds the purse strings because they're designed to carry on working once they're set up. As Baxter put it, an agent working without prompts is no longer tied to someone sitting at a keyboard." That could prove awkward for public sector organizations accustomed to budgeting by headcount. Baxter pointed to NHS England's Copilot rollout, where license allocations across 505,000 staff give buyers a cost that they can plan around. Putting agents used for jobs such as complaints handling or freedom of information requests on a meter leaves trusts with a variable cost and, at least initially, little usage history on which to base a forecast. Microsoft's attempts to bundle Copilot with subscriptions and charge accordingly have already attracted some unwanted attention. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation in July into whether customers were properly informed when Microsoft added Copilot to consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions and moved them onto more expensive plans unless they opted for a cheaper Classic alternative. This time, Microsoft is drawing a clearer line between the Copilot included in a subscription and the more ambitious stuff that costs extra. That's becoming more important as Copilot itself grows from a chatbot bolted onto Microsoft's existing applications into what the company is pitching as a super app." The super app, then, comes with a super-app-sized ambition - and a meter for the bits that require the most horsepower. (R)