--- title: "What Is Microsoft Copilot? (And What It Costs)" description: "Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant in Word, Excel and Teams. What it does, the current prices, and where a custom coded agent goes further." canonical: "https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/blog/what-is-microsoft-copilot" published: "2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z" updated: "2026-09-30T09:47:18.638Z" --- # What Is Microsoft Copilot? (And What It Costs) Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant in Word, Excel and Teams. What it does, the current prices, and where a custom coded agent goes further. ![Microsoft Copilot inside the Microsoft 365 apps, and where a coded agent takes over a full process](https://fgzcpjbyiakhjifaciaj.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/media/pexels-altabena-10142683.jpg) Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, built into Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook. It helps with everyday tasks, writes text and lifts productivity. The business version works with your own company data, from €15.60 per user per month. Prices checked 1 September 2026. Microsoft adjusts its rates and promotions regularly, so always check them live before you decide. This guide covers what Microsoft Copilot actually is, what you can do with it, what the business version costs right now, and where the tool runs into its limits once you want something built around your own process. ### What is Microsoft Copilot? Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, built into the Microsoft 365 apps you probably already use. Under the hood it runs on large language models, the same kind of technology behind ChatGPT and [Claude](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/blog/what-is-claude-ai). The difference is the location: Copilot lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook, and in the business version it can also reach your own files, mail and calendar. Not to be confused with GitHub Copilot, the code assistant for developers. In practice, it works like this. Instead of a separate chat window next to your work, the assistant sits in the document itself. You ask it to draft something, summarise a long mail thread, or analyse a table in Excel, and it does that using the context already on your screen. The underlying terms, from language model to [AI agent](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/glossary/ai-agent), are in our glossary. There is one distinction that stays unclear on most pages: there is a free Copilot for consumers, and a paid business Copilot that works with your company data. The two look the same but do something quite different. The rest of this guide is mostly about the business side, because that is where the decision sits. ### What can you do with Microsoft Copilot? Copilot is fundamentally good at language: understanding, summarising and generating text. Across the Microsoft 365 apps that shows up in a few concrete things: - In Word: writing a first draft, rewriting or shortening existing text, and summarising documents that run to dozens of pages. - In Excel: suggesting formulas, building data analyses and naming trends in a table without you having to know the right function. - In Outlook: summarising long mail threads, drafting a reply and pulling the essentials out of your inbox. - In Teams: summarising a meeting live, distilling action points and telling someone who joins late what has been discussed so far. - In chat: answering questions, working out ideas and, in the business version, answering based on your own documents through the Microsoft Graph. The common thread is that Copilot makes your everyday tasks faster, not that it takes the work over. You stay the person who reviews the output and makes the call. That is exactly where it is at its best, and also where its limit sits, as shown further on. ### Is Copilot free? What does it cost? There is a free version, and there are paid business plans. The free Copilot Chat works with a Microsoft account through the web chat, with limited features and no access to your company data. For the real business work, where Copilot sits inside your documents and data, you pay per user per month. The current business prices (excl. VAT, checked 1 September 2026, [microsoft.com](https://www.microsoft.com/nl-nl/microsoft-365-copilot/pricing)): - Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business, as an add-on to your existing Microsoft 365: €15.60 per user per month (excl. VAT) billed annually, checked 1 September 2026. That is a promotional rate, normally from €18.20. Billed monthly it is €21.84 per user per month. - Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot: €20.36 per user per month annually, or €24.43 per month billed monthly. - Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot: €27.73 per user per month annually, or €33.28 per month billed monthly. Two things to know. The €15.60 promotional rate runs, according to Microsoft, from 1 July to 31 December 2026, applies to the first year only and requires an annual commitment, so that figure moves. And Copilot Studio, which lets you build your own assistants, is billed separately through usage credits; Microsoft shows no fixed euro amount for it on the business pricing page, so budget for a separate cost on top of the licences. Why this matters: an add-on of roughly €15 to €18 per user per month adds up to somewhere near €3,600 to €4,400 a year for a team of twenty. That is not a large amount, but it is enough to want to know what you get back before you switch it on for everyone. What a purpose-built solution puts against that is a separate trade-off this guide comes to below. ### Copilot for business: what is the difference from Chat and the bundles? Microsoft offers Copilot in a few flavours, and that distinction is explained in plain language almost nowhere. In short: - Copilot Chat: the free or cheap entry point. A chat window with a language model, without deep access to your own company data. Useful for general questions and drafts. - Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business: the paid add-on that puts Copilot inside your apps and, crucially, can securely reach your own files, mail and calendar through the Microsoft Graph. This is the version most companies mean when they say "Copilot". - The bundles: if you do not have Microsoft 365 yet, you buy Business Standard or Business Premium with Copilot as one subscription, instead of the add-on on its own. The practical question is almost always: is the free chat enough, or do you need the business version that works with your own data? As soon as the answer is "our own documents and processes", you are in the paid category, and the next question gets interesting: how far does that paid version actually reach? ### Copilot vs ChatGPT: what is the difference? The question comes up often, and the honest answer is that the models are closer together than the marketing suggests. ChatGPT is a general assistant you can point at anything. Copilot is fundamentally the same kind of model, but wrapped in Microsoft 365 and with secure access to your company data inside your own Microsoft environment. For a company already running fully on Microsoft, that integration is the real difference, not the quality of the answers. If you are not on Microsoft, that advantage falls away. A fuller comparison is in [Copilot vs ChatGPT](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/blog/copilot-vs-chatgpt); for now the core is: choose based on where your data sits and which tools you work in, not on a leaderboard. ### What is Copilot Studio? As soon as companies notice that the standard Copilot does not do exactly what they want, they arrive at Copilot Studio. That is Microsoft's low-code builder for your own agents, built into the Microsoft and 365 stack. In Studio you wire your own assistant to a few data sources with a visual editor, without having to program. Within that scope, Studio genuinely works well. For quick internal agents, a prototype to test an idea, or question-and-answer over Microsoft-native data in SharePoint and Teams, it is a fine choice. A business user can assemble something useful in it without an engineering team and have it live the same day. For bounded tasks, like a FAQ bot that searches your internal documents or an assistant that handles a standard question, that is exactly enough. The low-code approach also has a ceiling, and you feel it as soon as the demands grow. Reliability at volume gets hard; there is no real way to test or version it the way you would with software; complex or branching logic stalls in a visual editor; and integrations beyond the Microsoft Graph, into your own systems, are limited. And because the logic lives inside Microsoft's environment, you do not really own the agent: you are renting a setup you cannot lift out. That is where we come in, and it is worth being honest about what that means. We do not finish your Studio flow. When a Studio agent hits its ceiling, we rebuild it as a coded agent that solves the same problem, but reliably, testably and wired into your own systems, and that you own yourself. That is a different solution, not a completed version of the low-code attempt. We go deeper into this in [a separate guide](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/blog/workflow-automation-beyond-n8n-and-make); for now the core is that Studio stays useful inside its zone, and a coded agent begins where that zone ends. ### Where does Copilot run into its limits? Here I have to be honest, because this is the section most pages skip. Copilot is strong as a smart assistant next to your work. It is less strong once you want to hand over an entire process that runs on your own business logic. The signals are well known. In a [2024 Gartner survey](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542000/microsoft-365-copilot-rollouts-slowed-by-data-security-roi-concerns.html) of 132 IT leaders, only 3% reported significant value from Copilot, and many companies find the per-user surcharge hard to justify as long as it stays at helpful suggestions. That is not a criticism of the tool, it is the limit of what an assistant-per-seat does: it helps a person work faster, but it does not take an entire chain off your hands. In our work with clients who use Copilot we see the same pattern: strong for everyday tasks in Office, but as soon as a process needs to run reliably and tailored to the business, the low-code approach stalls. Take [Multi Ratio](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/cases/how-multi-ratio-cut-time-to-online-from-two-weeks-to-a-day), a Dutch office-furniture specialist with a Magento webshop of more than 8,000 products. Every new product had to pass through a chain of three people before it could go online: a spec sheet in, then a description, USPs, SEO text and metadata out, in the company's own tone of voice, against the real catalogue. A low-code Studio assistant can draft one description on request. What Multi Ratio needed was the whole chain: standardised input that automatically produces a complete, on-brand product, tied into their own Magento, with nobody sitting between the tools stitching them together. That is exactly where a purpose-built, coded agent goes beyond a low-code assistant. For Multi Ratio it cut time-to-online from two weeks to one day, 14x faster, and one person now owns the whole process instead of three. Importantly, that is not a Copilot that has been "finished", it is a different kind of solution. Copilot stays the assistant for the everyday work; when a specific process is the bottleneck, you build something around it that you own yourself. That kind of solution is [a custom AI agent](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/ai-agents): not an assistant beside your work, but a coded layer beneath the assistant that runs a complete process on your own logic and systems, exactly the work an assistant cannot take over. ### Copilot for your business For most companies already running on Microsoft 365, business Copilot is a reasonable first step: it makes the everyday writing, mail and analysis work faster, and at roughly €15 to €28 per user per month it is a manageable trial. The honest expectation is that you gain productivity with it, not that you automate a process. The limit is the point where you want to hand a complete, business-specific process over to software. Then it is not which model you use that counts, but the system around it that gathers the right context, checks the output and fits your process. We build that as production agents in code, model-agnostic, so the underlying AI is a swappable part rather than the foundation. Why that matters is set out in [model-agnostic AI architecture](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/blog/model-agnostic-ai-architecture). Not sure whether Copilot is enough for a specific problem in your business, or whether something needs to be built around it? [Book a free consultation](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/contact) and we will look at it against your own process. *Sources: prices and plans are from Microsoft, checked 1 September 2026 via [microsoft.com](https://www.microsoft.com/nl-nl/microsoft-365-copilot/pricing). The Copilot value figure is from Gartner's 2024 Microsoft 365 Copilot survey (132 IT leaders; 3% reported significant value), as reported by Computerworld. Multi Ratio figures are our own first-party results from the [client case](https://www.whatsnext-ai.com/cases/how-multi-ratio-cut-time-to-online-from-two-weeks-to-a-day).* ## Frequently asked questions ### What can you do with Microsoft Copilot? Copilot helps with everyday tasks in Microsoft 365: writing and rewriting text in Word, analysing data in Excel, summarising mail and meetings in Outlook and Teams, and answering questions in chat. In the business version it does that based on your own company data. ### Is Copilot free? There is a free Copilot Chat you can use with a Microsoft account, with limited features and no access to your company data. The business version, which works inside your documents and data, is paid and runs per user per month. ### How much does Microsoft Copilot cost? As of 1 September 2026 the business add-on costs €15.60 per user per month billed annually (a promotional rate, normally from €18.20), or €21.84 per month billed monthly. Bundles with Business Standard or Premium cost €20.36 and €27.73 per user per month annually. Microsoft adjusts these rates regularly. ### What is the difference between Copilot and ChatGPT? The underlying models are close together. ChatGPT is a general assistant; Copilot is wrapped in Microsoft 365 and can securely reach your own files, mail and calendar within your Microsoft environment. For companies already on Microsoft, that integration is the real difference, not the quality of the answers.