Microsoft is altering the way it costs for its software program for the primary time in 20 years, shifting to invoice prospects with a pay-as-you-go mannequin every time they use its new AI agent.
The change, prompted by the soaring cost of artificial intelligence, came Tuesday as the company launched Copilot Cowork: an AI “agent” that may independently perform workplace duties like drafting paperwork, constructing spreadsheets and sending emails.
The device nonetheless requires a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, however now each activity it runs is billed individually, based mostly on how a lot computing energy it consumes.
Copilot Cowork is Microsoft’s tackle so-called “agentic” AI, a wave that has gripped Silicon Valley and turned the easy chatbot into an assistant able to performing on a consumer’s behalf.
Like rival instruments on Google’s and Amazon’s enterprise platforms, it may be handed an task and run with it by itself, typically for a number of hours.
Microsoft says one buyer used it to check almost 4,000 paperwork in a matter of hours, and that the assistant can put together advanced conferences by synthesising emails, inside documentation and calendars.
The explanation for the brand new pricing comes all the way down to price: operating these AI programs calls for vastly extra computing energy than a search engine or a chatbot, and utilization can differ broadly from one consumer to the subsequent.
The brand new plan shall be “such as you’re filling up your gasoline tank on the pump,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s govt vice chairman for Copilot and brokers, advised AFP.
Below the previous system “there’s not one overarching consumer license that is sensible,” he stated, on condition that completely different customers devour broadly various ranges of computing energy.
The flip is a notable one for Microsoft, whose workplace software program has relied for some 20 years on mounted, predictable subscription charges.
“This can be a massive evolution for us … which has been a consumer subscription-based enterprise for therefore lengthy, for actually like 20 years,” Lamanna acknowledged, calling the brand new strategy “the one option to make the mannequin work.”
To protect towards runaway payments, the service is disabled by default, and corporations can cap spending per worker, per workforce or per division.
Microsoft is just not alone in taking this route. Its programming subsidiary GitHub moved to usage-based billing in early June, sparking anger amongst builders, a few of whom noticed their payments shoot up.
Anthropic, one of many United States’ AI flagships, introduced in early June that its latest cutting-edge fashions would quickly be billed by utilization moderately than included in subscriptions, even premium ones.
One other option to ease the invoice: customers will be capable to select which mannequin is used, roughly highly effective and due to this fact roughly costly.
At basic availability, Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic fashions, together with Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, whereas prospects on the “Frontier” tier can use the state-of-the-art GPT 5.5.
A “considerably cheaper” mannequin, named Cowork 1, is coming quickly for on a regular basis duties.
Revealed – June 17, 2026 11:10 am IST