Picture a two-partner accountancy firm in Ghent. On Friday morning, one partner asks Copilot to assemble the quarterly client pack; by Monday, an agent called something like "Fin" has drafted it, chased two missing invoices over email, and left a summary in Teams — all while the office was closed. That is the workplace Microsoft sketched on 25 September, when it announced what it calls the new Copilot. The part of the announcement that will actually land on your desk first, though, is not the agent. It is the meter attached to it.
What Microsoft actually announced
Three names to remember. The new Copilot bundles three things, according to Microsoft's announcement. Copilot Home merges the familiar chat with "Cowork", a mode where you hand off a whole task — an RFP response, a financial pack — rather than trading messages. Copilot Code lets you describe an app, tracker or workflow in plain language and get working software, built on GitHub Copilot technology and running inside your own Microsoft 365 environment. And Autopilot is the headline act: a persistent agent with its own identity and workspace. You give it a name, a role and a goal; it monitors Teams channels and Outlook, handles recurring work, and — in Microsoft's words — keeps working on tasks even when you are away from your computer.
The rollout is staged. None of this switches on everywhere at once. Home and Code are reaching Microsoft's opt-in Frontier programme first, over the coming weeks. Autopilot moved to an expanded private preview at the end of September, with broad availability promised by year-end. The admin analysis site Empowering.Cloud notes that Frontier features come without a standard service-level agreement — worth knowing before you route real client work through them.
The real change is how you pay
The subscription now covers only "everyday AI". The base Copilot licence — around €28 per user per month at Microsoft's list price, which Belgian IT firm EASI quotes at €28.10, with a Business Basic plus Copilot Business bundle from €25.40 — covers chat and Copilot inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. The new capabilities sit in a different bucket. Cowork, Code, Autopilot and the most capable frontier models are billed by usage, on top of the subscription.
Microsoft's own example numbers deserve a second read. According to Empowering.Cloud's breakdown, Microsoft illustrates the model with light users landing at roughly $40–100 per month all-in, and heavy users at $400 or more. In euros, that upper figure is around €340 — per person, per month. For a five-person firm, an enthusiastic month of agent use could cost more than the annual price of most of the software you run today.
Watch the default settings. Usage-based billing stays off until an admin creates a spending policy — with two exceptions. New Copilot purchases made directly from Microsoft default to usage billing from 19 October, and Copilot Business licences bought through resellers — the channel most European small businesses use — default to it from 2 November, with preset monthly limits. From October, every licensed user also starts seeing the Cowork, Code and Autopilot entry points in their apps, whether or not a spending policy gives them access. If your Microsoft licences come through a local IT partner, this is the month to ask them exactly what defaults you are on.
An agent with its own identity, under the GDPR
Autopilot is a data-protection question wearing a product name. An agent that reads your Teams channels and mailbox around the clock is processing personal data — clients', suppliers', employees' — and under the GDPR you remain the controller for all of it. The practical to-dos are familiar: give the agent the narrowest access that does the job, update your processing records, and check that your data-processing agreement with Microsoft covers this use. Microsoft wraps Autopilot in its enterprise identity and audit tooling, which helps, but the accountability stays with you.
The EU AI Act adds a lighter touch here. Since August, transparency rules apply when AI-generated content goes out the door. An agent that drafts and sends emails on your behalf makes that easier to trip over: nobody on your team may have read what "Fin" sent. A simple internal rule — agents draft, humans send, at least for anything client-facing — keeps you comfortably inside the lines while the tooling matures.
What a small team could actually do with this
The credible wins are the boring ones. A Lyon property manager could hand Cowork the monthly owner reports. A Rotterdam wholesaler could use Code to build the stock-alert tracker that has lived in someone's head for years — no developer, no separate low-code licence, and the result shows up in the Microsoft 365 admin centre with normal governance. An Autopilot watching a shared inbox for order confirmations and chasing the late ones is exactly the kind of dull, high-volume work where agents earn their keep and the meter stays reasonable.
When this isn't the right move
If you don't live in Microsoft 365, none of this applies to you. The new Copilot's pull is that it sits where your files, mail and chats already are. A business running on Google Workspace or on a handful of independent tools has cheaper, simpler ways to get agent help. If your budget needs to be predictable, wait. Usage-based pricing rewards teams that measure; billing dashboards for the new services only arrive from October, so the first months are flying half-blind. And if nobody owns your Microsoft admin settings, fix that before an agent — or a billing default — starts acting on your behalf. Preview features without an SLA are for experiments, not for the invoice run.
The meter is not a strategy
The genuinely new thing about 25 September is not any single feature — it is that the industry's biggest workplace software company now assumes work gets delegated to agents, and prices accordingly. Whether that assumption fits your business depends on what you would actually hand off, what it costs today, and what a metered agent doing it would cost instead. That is a question about your processes before it is a question about Microsoft. If you want a structured way to answer it, Cresly's AI Readiness Scan maps where AI — Copilot-shaped or otherwise — would genuinely pay for itself in your business, and where it would just be a new line on the bill.