Microsoft are huge fans of the Pay As You Go (PAYG) licensing/billing model for various products and now it has been extended for M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio.
Agents created with Copilot Studio provide answers to users, and these answers are measured in “messages:
Classic Answers
These are static answers written when the agent is created and only change when manually updated. These cost 1 message.
Generative Answers
These are dynamically generated answers using the conversation’s context and other knowledge. These cost 2 messages.
Tenant Graph grounded
This is a new option and allows agents to access internal information in SharePoint and also other sources via Graph connectors. This information will be incorporated within “generative” answers given by agents. These cost 30 messages.
This capability is included for users licensed with M365 Copilot and is also available on a PAYG basis for other users.
Autonomous Actions
As the name suggests, these agents act on their own via “generatively orchestrated triggers, topics, data connectors, and workflows” to complete tasks, answer queries etc. These cost 25 messages.
These are NOT included with the M365 Copilot license, so using agents with autonomous actions will be additional spend on top of the $30 per user per month license…which is already an add-on to your existing M365 license!
How does the pricing work?
Each message costs $0.01 which seems very low…however…it can quickly start to add up. Here is an example from Microsoft:
12,800 x $0.01 = $128 in PAYG costs.
Not a huge amount, about $33,280 per year. However, that’s for 100 users. If you had 1,000 users in that scenario it becomes $332,800 per year which is a much more significant amount…it’s about the same as buying M365 Copilot licenses for those users in fact.
You can purchase messages in bundles of 25,000 for $200 per month ($0.008 per message) which can help reduce spend a little on PAYG.
It seems likely that the behaviour Microsoft are hoping to drive will be for organisations to start out with this model and then, as spend increases, move them across to M365 Copilot licenses to increase the stickiness and adoption of their latest focus product.
You can see more from Microsoft here.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 