Microsoft 365 Copilot will be separately licensed, Microsoft Execs confirm

One question that everyone has been asking since Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, has been whether or not it will be separately licensed, and what the pricing details are.

We don’t yet have pricing information, but in the most recent earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood confirmed that using Copilot in general will be something that requires an additional license.

They were responding to a question from Brent Thill who asked where Copilot monetization would show up and if they were able to forecast what sort of price lift might be expect.

Neither executive provided any numbers or percentages but did confirm that separate licenses were most likely. The example they both gave of this approach was Github Copilot, which is available for individuals to purchase now, for an additional $10 per month (or $100 per year), or $19 per month for businesses. Both execs strongly suggested we can expect this model when Copilot comes to other applications.

Here’s the extract from the earnings call transcript, which you can read in full here: Microsoft Fiscal Year 2023 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call Transcript:

BRENT THILL, Jefferies: Thanks. On Copilot monetization, can you just give us a sense of how this shows up, where we’re going to see it? And ultimately, is there a simple price lift that you think you can get through a copilot, say 10%, 20%, 30% above where you saw the regular components of the suite, or is it too hard to factor in? Thank you.

SATYA NADELLA: I mean, overall, we do plan to monetize a separate set of meters across all of the tech stack, whether they’re consumption meters or per-user subscriptions. The copilot that’s priced, and it is there, is GitHub Copilot. That’s a good example of incrementally how we monetize the price lists out there, and others are to be priced, because we are in preview mode. But you can expect us to do what we’ve done with GitHub Copilot pretty much across the board.

AMY HOOD: Yeah, Brent, the best way of thinking about this is when we believe we’re adding a lot of value, and frankly, that’s what the copilots are doing and some productivity improvement, you can expect that we will have a list price for those. And you’ll be able to look at that as we get to release. And to Satya’s point, GitHub Copilot is a great example.