The five levels of Microsoft Copilot, from free chat to Cowork

Level 1 · Free with Microsoft 365

Copilot Chat

Anyone signed in with a work account on Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium already has Copilot Chat, at copilot.cloud.microsoft or in the Microsoft Copilot app. It has enterprise data protection, which means your prompts and files aren’t used to train Microsoft’s models. That alone is a big reason to use it instead of a personal ChatGPT account.

What it’s good at: anything where you bring the material. Paste in rough notes and get a customer letter. Upload a spreadsheet and ask what stands out. Draft a job ad, a policy, a grant narrative or a week of social posts. Research a question on the web with sources.

Where it stops: it can’t search your company files, SharePoint or Teams on its own. The one exception is Copilot Chat in Outlook, which can work with your own inbox and calendar even without a paid seat. Don’t count on Copilot inside Word, Excel or PowerPoint at this level. Whether it works there depends on the label the app shows.

Move up when: you catch yourself copying and pasting the same emails and files into Copilot every day. That’s the job the next level does for you.

Level 2 · Paid seat

The paid Copilot seat (Copilot Business)

Microsoft Copilot Business is the seat for organizations with up to 300 people: $18 per person per month in the first year with Microsoft’s promotion (for purchases through December 31, 2026), normally $21. It’s an annual commitment (paying monthly on the yearly plan costs $25.20), there’s a one-month free trial, and it adds on to Business Basic, Standard or Premium. Larger companies pay $30 for the enterprise seat with the same features.

The seat changes Copilot from a clever writer into an assistant that knows your business:

• It answers from your own work. Copilot draws on your email, meetings, calendar, chats, OneDrive and SharePoint, but only what that person is already allowed to see.
• Outlook: “catch me up on what I missed,” thread summaries, replies drafted from past emails, meeting prep.
• Teams: meeting recaps with action items and “what did I miss?” for recorded or transcribed meetings.
• Word, Excel and PowerPoint: draft from your own files, analyze data in plain English, turn a document into a deck. Agent Mode (generally available since April 2026) makes multi-step changes right in the open file.

Who should get one: seats are per person, and the people who get the most back are the ones buried in email, meetings, quotes and documents: usually the owner and the office manager. Start with one to three seats, measure for 60 to 90 days, then decide. Everyone else keeps free Copilot Chat.

Level 3 · Included with the seat

Agents: ready-made and your own

An agent is a version of Copilot set up for one kind of job. There are two kinds, and they work the same way: ready-made ones that Microsoft builds and maintains, and your own, built on your documents. Always check the ready-made list before building anything yourself.

Ready-made agents

Most are included with the paid seat:

Researcher and Analyst appear automatically for seat holders. Most others are turned on by an admin in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or added from the Agent Store in the Copilot app. The Word, Excel and PowerPoint Agents run on Anthropic’s models, which Microsoft turns on by default for US businesses. If you don’t see them, ask your admin to check Copilot › Settings › AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Your own agents

Ready-made agents don’t know your price list, your procedures or how you wrote last year’s estimates. Your own agents do. With Agent Builder (“New agent” in the Copilot app) you give an agent a name, instructions and your own documents, such as SharePoint folders of past quotes (up to 100 files), your employee handbook or your product sheets, and it answers from them. SharePoint agents do the same for one site or library.

Good first agents for most businesses: a procedures assistant new hires can ask “how do we handle a warranty call?”, a quote helper that works from your past estimates, and a customer reply assistant that answers in line with your policies.

Cost: no extra charge for people with a paid seat. Staff without a seat can use a shared agent too, but an answer that searches company files costs about $0.12 each, and only after an admin sets up billing. Agents built only on instructions and public websites are free for everyone.

We walk through building one in How to build a Copilot agent for your business.

Level 4 · Doing the work

Agents and flows that take action

Agent Builder agents answer questions. They can’t save a record, fill in a template or send an email. For that you step up to Copilot Studio and Power Automate. In our experience this is where the biggest time savings live, because the result is finished work instead of a draft you still have to copy somewhere.

• Power Automate cloud flows are automations that run on a schedule or when something happens: a new email, a form, a file in a folder. Flows that use the standard connectors (the built-in links to other apps: Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Excel, Forms, Approvals) are included with Microsoft 365 Business plans at no per-run cost. Some steps are premium: an AI step (reading an email or a receipt), filling in a Word template, or calling another web service. A flow with any premium step needs Power Automate Premium ($15 per user a month) or $0.60 a run, and AI steps also use Copilot Credits. See Power Automate pricing.
• Copilot Studio agents can ask set questions, call those flows and take actions in your systems. A rule-based agent (set questions and buttons, published to Teams) can run without per-use charges. An agent that uses AI to read photos or free-form requests runs on Copilot Credits, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go units, at $0.01 per credit. Microsoft doesn’t charge seat holders for agents used inside the company, within fair-use limits. Agents that serve customers, run on their own, or are used by staff without a seat do use credits, usually cents per conversation. When we plan a budget, we still allow a few cents per conversation, just in case. Build these with Copilot Studio’s New experience switch turned off: agents built in the New experience are billed differently, and use credits while you build and test them too. Every rate is in Copilot Studio pricing.

An example: a contractor photographs a job and types the measurements into Teams. An agent that works from two years of past estimates suggests crew size, hours and materials, using the current price list. A flow fills in the estimate template (this step needs Power Automate Premium, $15 a month), saves it to the customer’s folder and emails it for approval. Another flow follows up if the customer hasn’t answered in three days.

Level 5 · Pay per task

Copilot Cowork

Cowork, generally available since June 2026, is Copilot that carries out a multi-step job instead of just answering a question. Give it a goal and it plans the steps across Microsoft 365: it reads email and files, creates documents, drafts emails and books meetings, and asks you to approve anything sensitive, like sending. It can run on a schedule, such as a Monday-morning briefing.

It needs a paid seat, and every task is billed in Copilot Credits on top of it. Microsoft doesn’t publish a fixed price per task, but its own examples suggest about $2 for a light task like a weekly status update and about $5 for a medium one like preparing for a client meeting. An admin has to turn on Cowork and pay-as-you-go billing, and can set a spending limit, so there are no surprise bills. Cowork also uses Anthropic’s models, which are on by default for US businesses. Microsoft says Copilot Business has the same capabilities as its enterprise seat, but it hasn’t said outright that this includes Cowork. Check that it shows up in your own Microsoft 365 before you plan around it.

Worth it for: repeated multi-step chores you’d otherwise hand to an assistant. For a one-off question, Researcher or Copilot Chat is cheaper.