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Microsoft Copilot
That is what Microsoft Copilot is sold to recover: the drafting, the summarising, the searching for the version of the document somebody sent last Tuesday. Whether it recovers anything depends on which of the products you buy, who you give it to and what your files are shared with. This page answers all three, with Microsoft’s list prices and a calculator that puts a number on the hours before you spend anything.
Which Copilot?
One is free and already in your tenant. One reads your documents. One is priced for smaller organisations and can be stopped at the end of any month. One builds an assistant that does a job on its own, and one is for developers and is not ours to sell. Prices below are Microsoft’s list price for the Europe region, from the September 2026 price list; ours are lower and are confirmed on a pro-forma invoice.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
It sits inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and PowerPoint and can draft from the documents, mail and meetings your organisation already holds. It only ever sees what the person asking is already allowed to open, which is why the permissions review below matters more than the licence.
€312 per user a year (€26 a month) · £276.89 a year (£23.07 a month)
What it gives back Five companies, five departmentsMicrosoft 365 Copilot Business
The same assistant inside the Office applications, priced for organisations on the Microsoft 365 Business plans rather than the enterprise ones. It can be taken monthly and stopped at the end of any month, which makes it the sane way to run a pilot before committing anyone to a year.
€218.40 per user a year (€18.20 a month) · £193.82 a year (£16.15 a month)
Or €21.84 per user a month, no commitment, stop at the end of any month
Trial, at no charge How it differsCopilot Chat
A chat assistant included with Microsoft 365 at no extra cost. It answers from the open web and from what you paste into it, but it cannot reach into your documents and mail. Useful, and a fair way to find out who in the company would actually use an assistant before you buy anyone a licence.
Included with Microsoft 365 at no extra cost
Against ChatGPT and ClaudeMicrosoft Copilot Studio
Where you build an assistant of your own: answering the same twenty questions your helpdesk gets every week, or walking a new joiner through their first day. It is charged by how much the assistant is used rather than by the head, so the cost follows the workload.
€2,079.60 per capacity pack a year (€173.30 a month) · £1,845.57 a year (£153.80 a month)
A pack covers twenty-five thousand messages a month, shared across the organisation rather than bought per person, so the cost follows use. The user licence itself is priced at zero; the messages are the cost.
Agents in your tenant Helpdesk and onboardingGitHub Copilot
A different product that happens to share the name: artificial intelligence inside the code editor, completing code and answering questions about the codebase. It has nothing to do with the assistant in Word and Outlook beyond the name and the parent company.
Sold through GitHub per developer, and not on our Microsoft price list
How it differs Visual Studio subscriptionsThere is one more, and it is not for sale: the assistant built into Windows, Edge and Bing answers from the open web, sees nothing of your company’s data and needs no licence — in a company it is something to be aware of rather than something to buy. The full map of every product carrying the name is in the comparison. Every price on this site carries its source: facts and figures.
Before you buy anything
Roles, salaries and the minutes a day each role would save, in three scenarios from cautious to optimistic. It returns hours returned per year, what they are worth, what the licences cost against them, and how long the payback takes — then prints the whole thing as a business case for whoever signs it off.
Try it on your own tenant
Microsoft runs a trial of Copilot Business for organisations on the Microsoft 365 Business plans, registered through a partner. We register it on your tenant, add the licences and, if you want it, run the readiness review alongside the pilot. You decide at the end on hours you have measured, not on a demonstration.
Legal entities only. The trial is Microsoft’s; we register it and add the licences. No charge for the trial itself.
What decides whether it works
An assistant that can read the company’s documents will surface whatever has been shared too widely, and in most tenants something has. We look at what is reachable before the first licence is assigned, and fix the worst of it. Copilot oversharing assessment.
Giving everybody a licence is the reliable way to waste the budget. Start with the roles the calculator shows the largest return for, measure them for a month, then widen. Licensing review, free.
The licence does nothing on its own. People need three or four prompts that fit the work they do every day, and somebody to ask when it gets one wrong. Managed Microsoft 365.
Reading
Five pieces, all from work we have done rather than from Microsoft’s marketing.
What Copilot actually automated in engineering, healthcare, a law firm, logistics and a non-profit — what it did not, and the three things every rollout depends on.
From the free chat assistant to the capacity packs that run your own agents: what each one reaches, what each one costs, and which job each is for.
Where an assistant that sees your mail and documents wins, where a general chatbot is simply better value, and what your data does in each case.
What an agent is in plain language, what it needs to be given access to, and how to keep it from answering questions it should not.
The password resets and the first-day questions, handled without a person — what was built, what it cost and what came back.
Questions
It can only open what the person asking can already open. That is the problem: in most tenants a good deal is shared more widely than anyone realises, and nobody notices until an assistant surfaces it in a summary. We check what is reachable before the first licence is assigned, and it is the single most common reason a rollout is paused.
Yes. Microsoft runs a trial of Copilot Business for organisations on the Business plans, registered through a partner, and we register it for you. You get real licences on your own tenant for the pilot, and you decide on measured hours rather than on a demonstration.
No. Copilot Business can be taken monthly and stopped at the end of any month. A year commitment is cheaper per user and is worth signing once you know who uses it. We do not offer a year commitment paid monthly online — it is arranged under a signed agreement, by email.
The people who get the most from it write the same kind of document repeatedly, live in a crowded mailbox, or have to summarise meetings they sat through. It does very little for work that is mostly judgement, or work whose numbers are already in a system that reports on them.
On a monthly pilot, one month of licences for the pilot group. That is the argument for measuring the hours in advance and buying the smallest thing that can prove the case.
Tell us the roles and we will run the calculation with you, register the trial on your tenant and check what your documents are shared with before anybody is given an assistant.