Pay-as-You-Go AI Introduced for Enterprise Microsoft Copilot Chat

Microsoft is releasing a pay-as-you-go package for business clients that includes some but not all of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity capabilities for Microsoft 365.

The new concept, Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — is built on OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model and allows users to ask business-related queries, establish workflow automations, produce images, and more.

The GPT-4o artificial intelligence model powers Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a new enterprise-focused subscription service with support for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, was released on Wednesday. The Redmond-based software giant has aggressively marketed its Copilot subscription to businesses and consumers. The new subscription allows for more flexible access to the company’s AI services by replacing fixed subscription rates with a pay-as-you-go basis. The plan also grants access to Microsoft’s free Copilot Chat for enterprises.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Launched made the IT titan reveal specifics about the new subscription package, which is currently available to corporations. The new Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is effectively a “lite” version of the current Copilot plan, with a more flexible payment method and less AI features. The licence costs $30 per user per month. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft’s massive enterprise AI add-on for Microsoft 365, included all of these capabilities. However, pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot is more rigorous.

Microsoft announced in a blog post on Wednesday that Copilot Chat now offers pay-as-you-go services for Microsoft 365 commercial clients, in addition to its existing free chat experience. “Copilot Chat is a powerful new on-ramp for everyone in [an] organization to build the AI habit.”

Microsoft’s new subscription tier looks to be a smart move to persuade major enterprises that are still wary of these AI services and do not want to pay a high fee for thousands of employees. Instead, they can use the Copilot Chat to try the features and determine if they are a good fit. Businesses using the pay-as-you-go plan can also monitor their consumption and only utilize the service for important tasks.

Microsoft is now including free access to Copilot chat for corporations with the subscription. However, the AI chatbot is solely web-based (meaning it does not generate responses that have not been checked with a website), and it does not provide work-based functionality (enabling the chatbot to access Microsoft Graph and third-party data using Graph connectors).

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is just the company’s second subscription that includes access to AI bots. While 365 Copilot provides a metered payment option for agents executing autonomous activities, the Copilot Chat subscription charges for all work data-based actions.

In a discussion with The Verge, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s CMO of AI at Work, detailed how much businesses will have to spend to use AI bots.

Microsoft defines “messages” as the unit of AI agent utilization. Messages are essentially answers created by the agent. However, it is unclear if the length of the response or the special formatting increases the cost. Spataro informed the publication that one SMS equals one penny. “A message is equivalent to 1 cent, so you can essentially convert it over to 1 cent, 2 cents, and 30 cents,” Spataro tells TheVerge. “It spins an Azure meter and it burns down a customer’s MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment).” 

Using the AI chat for web-based responses costs no messages (free service), whereas traditional answers cost one message. If the Copilot is required to respond, firms will incur a fee of two messages. Furthermore, generating a response utilizing Microsoft Graph data will cost 30 messages, and autonomous actions (in which the agent conducts executable actions) would cost 25 messages each.

To provide a hypothetical real-world scenario, if a company uses Copilot Chat to generate 5000 work-related responses, 3000 messages in which the AI searches through company regulations for answers, and 4000 automated activities in a month, they will have to spend $2,000. Notably, these figures represent moderate usage for a medium-sized business (100–1,000 employees).

Copilot Chat’s functionalities are now available in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, which is a rebranded version of the Microsoft 365 app.

Users can use the app to ask Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot experience built on top of GPT-4o, to summarise key points in an uploaded file, produce a work document, or build an AI image. Alternatively, they can work on a project with coworkers and AI using the built-in Copilot Pages tool.

Microsoft is emphasizing Copilot Chat’s task automation capabilities, which it refers to as “agentic.”

Copilot Chat users can utilize the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to run “agents” that automate simple tasks such as providing account information before a sales meeting or delivering directions to a field service person. IT administrators can create and manage org-wide agents, as well as control access and security for individual agents.

Agents will be priced on a “metered basis,” according to Microsoft. It did not divulge much more; we have contacted the company for specific pricing information and will update this piece if we receive a response.

The Copilot Chat plan misses several of the features of Microsoft 365 Copilot, such as prebuilt agents and AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Copilot Chat customers also lack the customisation options accessible to Microsoft 365 Copilot members, as well as Microsoft’s recently released Copilot Analytics tool for measuring company-wide AI usage.

It appears like Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s attempt to persuade holdouts to purchase Microsoft 365 Copilot by dangling metered agentic functionalities, while also taking incremental fees from customers with less demanding AI requirements.

Office 365 Copilot has not been a home run for the software behemoth. According to Business Insider, Copilot, which Microsoft claims is utilized by nearly 70% of Fortune 500 businesses, is proving ineffective, expensive, and insecure for many enterprises. According to a recent Gartner survey, only 3.3% of IT leaders believe that Copilot has given considerable value to their companies.

In an internal message this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that the company’s priority for 2025 will be “[AI] model-forward applications” that “reshape all application categories.”

“We have a lot of work to do and a tremendous opportunity ahead,” Nadella said in a letter. “The good thing is that we have been operating at this for over two years now and have learnt a lot about all of the systems, app platform, and tools needed for the AI era.”