Copilot is going on the meter. What to settle before 2 November

In brief

On 25 September Microsoft introduced what it calls "the new Copilot", in three parts. Home combines chat with Cowork inside Office. Code is for building solutions. Autopilot is "a persistent, proactive, and personal agent hosted in the cloud". Microsoft set out the commercial model in one sentence: "User subscriptions support everyday Copilot value, while usage-based billing gives customers flexibility to access advanced capabilities."

In practice, chat and the Office integrations stay inside the per-user licence, while Autopilot, Code and Cowork move to usage-based billing. Microsoft has not published a rate card. The dates that matter come first. Copilot promotions for resellers end on 30 September. From 2 November, new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences bought through resellers have pay-as-you-go billing switched on by default, with a preset monthly limit.

This is the shift from licences that cost the same every month to meters that follow behaviour, and it arrives before most organisations have decided who controls the meter.

What changes, and when

What is still unknown is the price. There is no published price per unit of agent work, no stated included allowance, and no published default for the preset monthly limit.

Why it matters

Budgets stop tracking headcount. A seat licence costs the same whether the holder uses it or not, which makes it easy to budget and easy to waste. A meter costs nothing until it runs. An agent Microsoft describes as "persistent" and "proactive" is designed to run. The driver of cost moves from how many people you have to how your agents behave, and behaviour is harder to forecast.

Defaults decide spending. Turning pay-as-you-go on by default means spending starts unless someone acts. The preset limit caps the damage, but the limit is Microsoft's, not yours, until you change it.

The whole market is moving the same way. At Dreamforce, Salesforce launched seven "job-ready" agents and its AIforce interface layer without publishing prices. Microsoft opened a preview of Dynamics 365 Activate, an assessment tool aimed first at moving customers off Salesforce. On 16 September Gartner forecast that AI spending would reach $2.67 trillion in 2026. It said enterprises in generative AI's "Trough of Disillusionment" are favouring AI built into the software they already use. That is exactly where metering is arriving, so buyers have more leverage than the list prices suggest.

On-premises Office is out of the picture. Microsoft says Microsoft 365 Copilot runs only on cloud-backed apps. Organisations still on perpetual Office cannot use it at all, which turns their Office renewal into a Copilot decision. ByteNib covers that in Microsoft's autumn deadlines.

The blueprint: six steps before the meter starts

1. Decide who can switch it on. Treat usage-billed features as off for users until a named business owner approves a use case. Put that rule in tenant policy, not in a memo.
2. Set your own limits before 2 November. For any Copilot Business licences bought through a reseller, find the preset monthly limit and replace it with a number you chose. Set alerts well before the cap, not at it.
3. Route AI consumption through FinOps. Tag usage to cost centres, review it monthly alongside cloud spend, and show each department what it used. If Microsoft's FinOps for AI tooling helps, adopt it, but do not wait for it.
4. Measure value per unit, not adoption. Pick two or three use cases and record a baseline before the agent starts. Then track completed work per unit of spend. Counts of active users, the metric seat licences trained everyone to report, say nothing about a meter.
5. Get the rate card in writing before you scale. Ask for unit prices, included allowances, notice periods for price changes, protection against increases during the contract, and a hard spending cap. Use the Salesforce and Microsoft competition for CRM and agent workloads as leverage.
6. Tie reliability to the bill. On 16 September Salesforce was degraded worldwide for about eleven hours. Its status updates said requests were stalling while waiting on an internal login service. Usage-billed agents that depend on one login path need service credits and retry rules that do not charge you for failures.

Sources and scope

The product structure, dates and quotations are from Microsoft's Partner Center announcements for September 2026. The split between licence and usage billing, and the absence of published rates, are from The Decoder. Salesforce's agents and AIforce are from Salesforce and its AIforce announcement. The outage is from The Register. The Gartner forecast is from its press release, with figures taken from a verbatim republication because Gartner's site could not be read directly.

Microsoft had not published usage rates or included allowances when this was written, and terms may differ for enterprise agreements and direct purchases. The blueprint is ByteNib editorial analysis.

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