Microsoft
MicrosoftMicrosoft's AI pricing is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. It feels like you're paying multiple times for access to the same underlying models.
At some point you have to ask: why not just subscribe to Claude and eliminate all of this complexity?
The fragmented licensing model makes it hard to understand what you're actually paying for, especially when much of it is built around access to the same family of foundation models.
This is where the partner consulting community comes in, to guide customers on what they should implement. Because, yes, AI capability costs money to provide, no matter over which service it is delivered. It falls to us, the partners, to be the experts.
I have a baseline Microsoft 365 E3 account on my tenant that I keep without Copilot User licensing, for demoing purposes. That's the starting point I tell clients they have. And it is pretty substantial; It automatically includes Enterprise-grade chat in M365 Copilot Chat, which can create and edit Office documents. It's also possible to create custom M365 Copilot Chat agents grounded in publicly available sites.
At that point, it's about which purchase will provide value and which purchase won't. It might be that an organization just needs custom agents that get used a few hundred times a month. In that case it's all about Copilot Credits PAYG. For high use agents across a group of users, maybe they get the Copilot 365 User license. Is the agent going to be used externally a lot? Foundry Agents might be worth considering.
Is the client doing something in Microsoft 365 super-duper complex? Well, at that point maybe GitHub Harness has a role, but that is a steep bar to get to.
Regarding Copilot in Fabric Capacities, there is one feature that gets underrepresented. It is the only Copilot without Internet access and by design it will not use your business data in the model. Instead, it utilizes the semantic model to come up with the DAX necessary for the Power BI engine to run. From a security/compliance perspective, that alone might be worth the money. Or not. A Copilot Studio agent versed in a database schema can come up with SQL and utilize a SQL Azure database via a tool to do some pretty impressive stuff.
And yes, Github Copilot costs can now easily add up.
On the plus side, this raises the value of our consulting work. Organizations need to be much more disciplined about how they deploy AI compared to other recent technologies. They need experts, namely us.
