Microsoft announced last week (15th Jan) that Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is coming to every Microsoft 365 Commercial Customer regardless of whether or not they have paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses and what’s more we now get access to use agents with company data grounding support. Along with it comes a new pay-as-you-go tier that allows employees to access everything from chatbots to agents without the need for a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
While Microsoft is still confident that the full Microsoft 365 Copilot remains “our best in class personal AI assistant for work“, the new pay-as-you-go tier means organisations can start using the technology at a much lower entry point and look to address key business cases rather than going full in on Microsoft 365 Copilot. .
“Copilot Chat enables your entire workforce — from customer service representatives to marketing leads to frontline technicians — to start using Copilot and agents today”.
Jared Spataro | Chief Marketing Officer | AI at Work | Microsoft.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat?
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s AI-powered chat feature designed to empower every person in every organisation to leverage Generative AI to make their “work lives easier and more efficient”.
For the employee, Microsoft Copilot Chat is a “personal assistant” they can chat with to get get answers, understand things better and get things done faster. Copilot Chat is It’s part of the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot suite but focuses specifically on enhancing communication and collaboration through chat.
How is Copilot Chat Different from Microsoft 365 Copilot?
The main differences between Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot is three-fold.
- Chat within Microsoft 365 Copilot provides work-grounded chat which means that Copilot can reason over data within your Microsoft 365 organisation such as files, SharePoint sites, your OneDrive, people (within Entra ID), your meetings, chat and email etc. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat cannot access this data unless you “paste” into a chat window.
- Copilot within the Office 365 Apps such as Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word etc is only available with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid add-on, where as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is included for free within your core Microsoft 365 licensing.

Microsoft Copilot Chat – Beyond Web Grounded Chat!
I’m personally not a fan of the name Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat because I do think it confuses people. The point I want to bring out here and why this was worthy of a post, is that previously, Copilot Chat (as it was called) only had access to data on the web and did note have the ability to leverage any of the new AI features such as Agents.
This has now changed. As the table above shows, with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, organisation will be able to create agents that do have access to data stored or connected to your Microsoft 365 tenant and also (and this is big) the ability for organisations to build and use autonomous agents (agents that can operate independently of a user).
The use of these new AI capabilities are paid for using a PAYG model. This means non Microsoft 365 Copilot users will have access to AI agents (for example in SharePoint) even if they themselves do not have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
What does Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Provide?
Key Features of Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Copilot Chat
- Free, secure AI chat powered by GPT-4 and GPT-4o.
- Ability to use Copilot Agents for automating tasks directly in the chat.
- Support for file uploads in chat for summarising documents, analysing data, and suggesting improvements.
- Support for Copilot Pages
- Collaborate in real-time with AI and team members.
- Integrate content from Copilot, files, and the web.
- Create AI-generated images for campaigns and social media.
- Agents
- Ability to create and use agents using natural language to automate repetitive tasks.
- PAYG / metered pricing for agents with IT control over deployment and management rather than requiring all users to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
- Copilot Control System
- Enterprise data protection (EDP) for privacy and security.
- Enables IT to better govern access, usage, and lifecycle of Copilot and agents.
- Allows for measurement and reporting capabilities just like other Copilot Services.
Use Case Examples
A couple of use case scenarios are;
- A customer service rep can ask a customer relationship management (CRM) agent for account details before a customer meeting.
- A service or field service agent can access step-by-step instructions or real-time product information from information stored in SharePoint or Dynamics 365.
- A sales person can get help with positioning a product based on information on solution propositions or marketing collateral.
How much does it cost?
Understanding the charges is not super straight forward to map. For comparison though, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license costs around $30 per user per month, so use this as a basis for comparison.
In another blog post, Richard Riley, General Manager of Power Platform at Microsoft said that “usage of agents is measured in ‘messages’ and the total cost is based on the sum of messages used by your organization.“
So what does that mean? Well, Microsoft now offers two ways for organisations to access the pay-as-you-go version of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat:
- Track each “message” sent to the AI whereby each message costs $0.01, billed monthly.
- Pre-buying a pack of messages. This works a bit like a mobile data plan. As an example, you can buy 25,000 messages for $200 a month
The actual cost vary based on the type of response you need with responses that need generative AI costing more than responses that don’t.
- Web-based answer: Free / no-cost
- Classic answer: 1 message
- Generative answer: 2 messages
- Answers pulling data from company’s own systems (e.g., SharePoint): 30 messages
This paid capability is of course optional and organisations can decide whether to turn it ‘on’ or ‘off’ in Copilot Studio.”
Riley introduced the concept of “autonomous actions,” describing them as “generatively orchestrated triggers, topics, data connectors, and workflows, visible in the activity map displayed in generative orchestration mode“.
These are also available as pay-as-you-go, with a cost of 25 messages each time they act.
Here’s some costed use examples…
- An agent answering customer questions online could use 500 classic answers and 2,000 generative ones, costing $45 for those 4,500 messages.
- Another agent answering HR questions internally using Microsoft Graph data might use 200 generative and 200 tenant Graph messages, costing 6,400 messages or $64 for the day.
This approach allows businesses to fine-tune their AI usage to meet their specific needs, addressing concerns about the high costs of deploying these tools across enterprises. It also helps cost modeling certain scenarios much easier and provides an alternative to just giving every person a $30 per month Copilot License.
Using Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
Assuming IT have enabled this in your environment, you can try this by navigating to https://m365copilot.com or by downloading the Microsoft 365 Copilot App from your preferred app store.