If You Wrote Off Copilot, This Is a Reasonable Moment to Look Again

Microsoft has taken a lot of heat on Copilot over the past year, and a fair amount of it was earned. Earlier this week we wrote about the features Microsoft just retired, group chats and podcasts and Deep Research among them, and about what it means to build your working week inside a tool somebody else can switch off.

Across our own clients, almost nobody had built anything on the features that went. They were not what people were using it for. Meanwhile the part people actually do use has got noticeably better over the last several months, and if you tried Copilot early, decided it was an expensive autocomplete and moved on, your opinion is now out of date.

That is not a claim that it is good. It is a claim that it is different from the thing you tried.

The Specific Thing That Changed for Us

We are going to name one improvement rather than list ten, because one thing you can picture is worth more than a feature grid.

It has got good at assembling a picture of a person.

You can ask it what is going on with a particular client, and it will pull together what that person has said to you across Teams and across Outlook and give you back the current state of the relationship. Not a search result. A read on where things stand, who is waiting on what, and what you have not answered.

That is a job we used to do by hand, badly, by scrolling back through a Teams thread and then going hunting through email for the bit we half remembered. On a Monday morning with fourteen of those to get through, the difference is real.

That is our experience of it. Whether it lands the same way for you depends on how much of your work arrives as a conversation with a person.

Something Checkable Underneath It

Improvements are easy to assert and hard to prove, so here is one piece of the picture that is a matter of public record rather than opinion.

Microsoft has onboarded Anthropic as a subprocessor, and Anthropic's Claude models now run inside Copilot, Researcher, Copilot Studio, Power Platform and Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps. In the US commercial cloud that is switched on by default.

Why Microsoft did that is Microsoft's business. What is on the record is that Copilot no longer runs on a single company's models.

There is a practical footnote for you as an administrator. Because those providers process your data, whoever holds your admin account can see which ones are switched on for your tenant, and turn them off. That is worth knowing whichever way you decide.

What It Actually Costs

This is the part most articles get wrong, so we are going to be exact and show our work.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is an add-on. It sits on top of a Microsoft 365 plan you are already paying for, and it is only available to existing customers on an eligible Business plan. It is not something you can buy on its own.

The list price is $21.00 per user per month, paid yearly.

There is a promotional rate of $18.00 per user per month, paid yearly. Microsoft's own terms: the discount is available between July 1, 2026 and December 31, 2026, an annual commitment is required, and the promotional pricing applies to the first year only. Year two is $21.00. The subscription auto-renews, there is a 7-day cancellation window for a prorated refund, and it cannot be combined with another offer.

So the saving is three dollars a seat a month, for one year. On five seats that is a hundred and eighty dollars over the year. Worth having, not worth rebuilding your decision around.

The number we would actually point you at is the monthly one. $25.20 per user per month, no annual commitment.

That is more expensive per seat, and it is the right answer for most people reading this. If the honest position is "I do not know whether this is worth it," then paying a premium to find out over one or two months, on two or three seats, with no year-long commitment attached, is a better deal than locking twelve months in at $18 to save three dollars on a thing you have not tested. Buy the option to change your mind.

If You Are a Nonprofit, You Pay the Same

There is no nonprofit price for Microsoft 365 Copilot Business. Not a smaller discount, not a longer window. It does not exist. The $18 is a commercial promotional rate that happens to be open to everyone, and a nonprofit pays exactly what a business pays.

Given how the rest of Microsoft's nonprofit program works, the reasonable assumption is that a nonprofit rate must exist somewhere and you have not found it yet. For this product it does not, and that is worth knowing before you spend a week looking.

A nonprofit discount does exist on the other, larger Copilot license. That is a different product with a different price, and comparing the two properly means comparing what they actually do, which is a conversation and not a paragraph.

Two Limits Worth Naming

Nothing here says Copilot beats the alternatives. That comparison takes real work and we have not done it.

And the cheaper license is not automatically the right license. Price is the easy axis to decide on and usually the wrong one.

What We Would Do

Put it on two or three seats, monthly, no commitment. Pick the people whose week is mostly other people. Give it two weeks of honest use, not one afternoon of trying to catch it out.

If it does not earn its money, turn it off. That is the whole point of taking the monthly path.

And if you already tried Copilot in the early days and wrote it off, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to have done. It is also worth revisiting, because the thing you tried and the thing available now are not quite the same product.

If you want a hand working out which license you are actually on, whether the add-on applies to your plan, or how to switch it on for a couple of people without disturbing anything, book a free 30-minute strategy session and we will walk through it with you.