The communication about the entry point for Copilot doesn’t seem to have had the reach Microsoft had hoped for. Organisations are voicing their disappointment at minimum license counts, annual commitments and the uplift to a base license of Microsoft 365 E3 or E5.

One aspect that people don’t appreciate is the cost of running Copilot in each tenant. It’s not as easy to quantify as Exchange and SharePoint running in the Microsoft Cloud. We got so used to getting a large collection of enterprise platforms and software for $30 user / month that we forgot how much of a bargain that is. But it became achievable through years of learning, experience and scalability of Exchange, SharePoint, Teams and other Microsoft 365 products.

Early adopters of Copilot are paying for Microsoft’s learning and a higher portion of the running costs than they are used to. It may be a while before the lessons learned from running Copilot can help lower the entry point and make Copilot generally available to more customers.