Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft has attached the Copilot name to so many things that the search results collide. This page is about the assistant that lives in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and Windows, and is licensed through Microsoft 365. It is not GitHub Copilot, which is a separate product with separate plans that writes and reviews code inside editors. If you arrived looking for autocomplete in VS Code, nothing on this page applies to you.

Within the Microsoft 365 world there is a further split worth fixing in your head before you look at any price. There is a free consumer Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com. There is Microsoft Copilot Chat, included with eligible business subscriptions, which chats and searches the web with enterprise data protections but does not reach into your organisation's content. And there is the paid Copilot licence, which is the one that grounds answers in your own mail, chats, meetings and files through Microsoft Graph. That last capability is the entire product.

Microsoft's own documentation now carries a note that Microsoft 365 Copilot is being renamed Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is being renamed Microsoft Copilot Chat, with older names persisting across licences and interfaces during the transition. On the consumer side the standalone Copilot Pro subscription has disappeared from the plans page, replaced by Microsoft 365 Premium. Expect vendor pages, admin centre labels and third-party write-ups to disagree with each other for a while yet. When you are comparing quotes, match on the SKU in the admin centre rather than the marketing name.

Four rungs, and the gap between them is where budgets go wrong.

• Copilot Chat — no additional cost, included with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription and a Microsoft Entra account. Web-grounded chat, current models, file uploads with limits, Copilot Pages, IT controls.
• Microsoft 365 Premium — $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year for individuals, sitting above Personal at $9.99 and Family at $12.99. This is where consumer Copilot capacity and the Researcher and Analyst agents now live.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business — the small-business add-on, listed at $21 per user per month paid yearly with a promotional rate of $18, or $25.20 per user per month billed monthly. Microsoft also sells bundles: Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32 per user per month paid yearly.
• Microsoft Copilot (enterprise) — $30.00 per user per month on an annual commitment, or $31.50 paid monthly.

The critical structural point is that the paid tiers are add-ons. A $30 seat is $30 plus whatever the underlying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licence costs, and Microsoft's licensing documentation lists the qualifying plans explicitly — Microsoft 365 E7, E5, E3, F1, F3 and the Business plans, Office 365 E1, E3, E5 and F3, plus Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, Project, Visio and Clipchamp plans. Anyone quoting you a headline per-seat figure without naming the base plan underneath it is quoting half a price. Government tenants can add Copilot in GCC, GCC High and DoD; academic plans are available through Enrollment for Education Solutions for faculty, staff and students aged 13 and over.

The mechanism is retrieval over Microsoft Graph, executed with the signed-in user's permissions. Copilot orchestrates between a large language model, the content in Graph that you personally have access to, and the app you happen to be in. Ask it to summarise a thread, draft from a document, or pull the state of a project, and it retrieves what you could already have opened yourself and reads it for you.

That design has a governance consequence that Microsoft's own guidance and the UK government's trial both flag: Copilot inherits the permissions your organisation actually configured, not the ones it thinks it configured. If people can already open files they should not, Copilot makes that visible fast. Microsoft's answer is that this is a knowledge-management problem, and it is right, but the remediation work lands before the rollout, not after.

Microsoft has also layered agents on top. The Business plan highlights list pre-built agents including Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator, chat and search powered by a workplace intelligence layer Microsoft calls Work IQ, adoption analytics, and explicit model choice. Copilot Cowork, for handing off longer multi-step tasks, is the newest addition.

For commercial customers this is the strongest part of the pitch and it is documented rather than implied. Microsoft states that Copilot, including Copilot Search, is compliant with its existing privacy, security and compliance commitments to Microsoft 365 commercial customers, including GDPR and the EU Data Boundary. It states that prompts, responses and data accessed through Microsoft Graph are not used to train foundation large language models, including those Copilot uses. It documents protections including harmful-content blocking, protected-material detection and prompt-injection defences. And it publishes separate subprocessor documentation for both the OpenAI and the Anthropic models used inside Copilot experiences.

That combination — a residency commitment, a no-training commitment, and named model subprocessors — is what tends to get Copilot through procurement in European and public-sector environments where a general-purpose chatbot subscription stalls.

Copilot Studio is the adjacent product for building custom agents: conversational or autonomous, grounded in business data, publishable to the channels your teams and customers already use, with voice agents and a template store. GPT-5 and Anthropic models are both available in its multi-model lineup, and Microsoft has introduced Agent 365 as a control plane for managing agents alongside existing apps.

Its billing is separate and worth budgeting for. Since 1 September 2025 the common currency across Copilot Studio capabilities is Copilot Credits, replacing the older message-based metering, available through pay-as-you-go meters, prepurchase plans and prepaid credit pack subscriptions. The maker licence itself is free but requires a tenant prepaid credit pack, and a Microsoft Copilot licence also grants access. Translation: per-seat Copilot licensing does not cap what your agents can spend.

The most substantial independent evidence is the UK Government Digital Service cross-government experiment — 20,000 employees across 12 organisations, running from 30 September to 31 December 2024 and published in June 2025. Participants saved an average of 26 minutes a day. More than 70% agreed it reduced time spent searching for information and on mundane tasks and increased time on strategic work. Satisfaction scored 7.7 out of 10 and recommendation 8.2, and 82% said they would not want to return to working without it. The report also noted a positive effect for users with accessibility needs.

The same report is candid about where it thinned out: limitations on complex, nuanced or data-heavy work, and reduced benefit in a minority of cases where users had concerns about security and handling sensitive data. That is a fair summary of the general pattern in reporting on Copilot — strong on summarising, searching and first drafts; weaker the moment a task requires sustained reasoning over messy numbers.

Do the arithmetic locally rather than borrowing anyone's. Twenty-six minutes a day is worth a great deal at senior professional rates and very little for staff whose recovered time does not convert into anything billable. Add the base licence you must hold, and any Copilot Credits your agents consume.

If you are an individual who lives in Word and Outlook, Microsoft 365 Premium is the sensible entry point, and the free consumer Copilot is enough to decide whether you want more. If you run a business already on Microsoft 365, start everyone on the included Copilot Chat, then buy paid seats for the specific roles that spend their day hunting through mail, meetings and SharePoint — that is where work-grounded retrieval pays. If you are not a Microsoft 365 shop, the value proposition mostly evaporates: without Graph underneath it, Copilot is a chatbot competing with chatbots that do not require a base licence.