Copilot for business: price, Business and Enterprise plans and rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot step by step

What M365 Copilot is and how it differs from the free Copilot Chat

Microsoft 365 Copilot (formerly Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365) is an AI assistant built into the applications the company already uses: Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. One thing sets it apart from an ordinary AI chat. It has access to company data through Microsoft Graph, the service that connects emails and calendars with files and chats. So it can answer the question “what did we agree with client X last month?”, because it searches the correspondence and notes you have access to.

Alongside the paid Copilot there is the free Copilot Chat, available in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (at m365.cloud.microsoft) for users with work accounts. It is a chat with internet access and protection for company data, but without full access to the organisation's documents. Since 15 April 2026, according to Microsoft announcements quoted by the advisory firm SAMexpert, Copilot Chat has disappeared from Word and Excel, as well as from PowerPoint and OneNote, for unlicensed users in organisations with more than 2,000 seats. Smaller companies have kept basic access.

Watch the names: GitHub Copilot is a completely different product, an assistant for developers. Its pricing (according to the GitHub blog of April 2026, the Business plan costs 19 USD and Enterprise 39 USD per user per month, with usage-based billing from 1 June 2026) has nothing to do with the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

What Copilot does in Outlook, Teams, Word and PowerPoint

In Outlook it summarises long threads and drafts a reply in the tone you specify. In Teams it produces meeting notes with a list of tasks and owners and answers questions about how the conversation went, if the meeting was recorded or transcribed. In Word it writes the first draft of a document based on files you point to and compares versions. In PowerPoint it builds a presentation from a source document.

According to Microsoft’s website, the Copilot Business plan also includes ready-made agents: Researcher (gathers and combines information from company documents and the web) and Analyst (analyses data). It is a first step towards AI agents, which carry out multi-step tasks. How Copilot fits into the wider picture of tools and rules is shown in our guide to implementing artificial intelligence in business. If you would like someone from outside to help plan where AI makes sense in your company, see the approach taken by Commplace® AI agency.

Copilot price 2026: what Copilot 365 costs in Poland

Below are the prices from Microsoft’s Polish price list (euro, net, as of 24 September 2026) and the price of the plan for large companies from the US price list. Every plan requires a separate Microsoft 365 licence, unless you buy a bundle that already includes Copilot.

Copilot Business vs Enterprise: which plan to choose

Microsoft launched Microsoft 365 Copilot Business on 1 December 2025 with small and medium-sized businesses in mind. According to Computerworld of 19 November 2025, the plan offers the same features as the enterprise version, but at a lower price and for organisations of up to 300 people. Existing customers were not moved over automatically; they had to request it.

Who Copilot for business is for and when it pays for itself

Copilot pays off where people spend a large part of the day working with text and with information scattered across inboxes and folders. It does less for people who work in a single industry-specific system or in production.

Typical situations where it makes sense.

• A manager with eight meetings a day: Copilot in Teams takes notes and draws up a task list, and also answers the question “what did I miss?”.
• A sales team that has to go through the history of emails and proposals before talking to a client.
• Marketing and PR preparing first drafts of texts, report summaries and responses to media enquiries.
• A board that wants quick summaries of long documents and comparisons of contract versions.
• Controlling and finance. We have devoted a separate guide to working with numbers, on AI in Excel.

Deploying Microsoft Copilot in six steps, from pilot to company-wide

Deploying Microsoft Copilot is more an organisational project than an IT one. Installation takes minutes. Without preparation, however, people stop using it after two weeks. You will find a broader plan for introducing AI in the marketing and communications department in the article rolling out AI in marketing and PR: a 90-day plan.

1. STEP 01Review file permissions

   Check who has access to which SharePoint sites, OneDrive folders and Teams teams. Copilot shows only what the user has read permission for, so if the payroll folder is open to everyone, Copilot will make it available to everyone too.

2. STEP 02Choose the pilot participants

   Take 10–20 people from different departments who spend their day in email, meetings and documents. Do not pick only technology enthusiasts. The results would be too optimistic.

3. STEP 03Measure before you start

   For each person, two or three measurable tasks: time to prepare the weekly report, number of unanswered emails, time spent preparing for a client meeting. Without this, after a month all you will have left are impressions.

4. STEP 04Training on your own tasks

   Instead of a feature demo, run a workshop in which people do their real tasks with Copilot. What to expect from good training is covered in our piece on AI training for companies.

5. STEP 05Four to six weeks of work, then measure

   Repeat the measurement from step three. Also compare the results with a group of people who did not receive a licence, because that is the only way to separate the effect of Copilot from seasonality.

6. STEP 06Decide on scale

   You extend licences to the roles where the pilot showed a gain. Everyone else keeps the free Copilot Chat.

What IT and the legal department must check in Copilot before launch

In its Copilot documentation (updated 18 August 2026), Microsoft states that neither prompts and responses nor data retrieved through Microsoft Graph are used to train language models. Data of users from the European Union remains within the EU Data Boundary, with one exception: models from Anthropic, which Microsoft uses as a subprocessor, are currently excluded from it.

For companies in regulated industries, this means a concrete decision: do you allow Anthropic models in Copilot, or do you switch them off in the admin settings? We write more about the risks, including the less obvious ones, in the article AI risks and ethics in the company.

When you need a partner to deploy Copilot

There are Microsoft partners on the market offering consulting and implementation services for Copilot (found in search as “Microsoft Copilot consulting services”, “implementation services” or “deployment services”). In a small company of up to 50 people with tidy files, your own administrator and good training are usually enough. A partner makes sense when the company has several years of mess in SharePoint, wants to connect Copilot to non-Microsoft systems (CRM, ERP) or to build its own agents.

When choosing a partner, ask three things: how they will review permissions, how they will measure the pilot's effect and who will provide training for ordinary users, not just for IT. Ask every AI contractor similar questions; we have compiled the full list alongside our comparison AI software house or AI agency.

How to check whether Copilot pays off

In its sales materials Microsoft talks about the benefits for large companies (“Microsoft Copilot benefits for enterprise”), but your company needs its own measurement. The simplest calculation: how many hours a month one person in the pilot saves, multiplied by the cost of their working hour, compared with the price of the licence.

Correlation is not impact. If the sales team answers customers faster after deployment, check whether that is down to Copilot or to lower seasonal traffic. Two methods help: comparison with a group without licences in the same weeks and comparison with the same month of the previous year. At Commplace® we label every such figure with an evidence tag, because we treat a measured fact differently from a hypothesis.

Before buying, compare Copilot with the competition; we have done this comparing it with ChatGPT and Gemini.

When to buy Copilot, and when to wait

A good time to buy is before budget planning for the next year. According to Microsoft Poland, the promotional price of Copilot Business applies until 31 December 2026 with annual billing and only covers the first year of the licence, so an autumn pilot lets you decide on scale while that price still applies. Changes to Microsoft’s price list happen regularly (search engines show this through queries about “copilot pricing change”), so check prices on the day you buy.

Wait if: the company does not use Microsoft 365 as its main working environment, documents sit on local drives, nobody is responsible for permissions, or the team needs one specialised tool rather than an all-purpose assistant. In that situation a better start is an AI assistant in the company built around a single process, or AI on company knowledge.

Copilot alone will not change how the company communicates internally either. If information gets lost between departments, start with internal communication. AI only speeds up what already works.

Mistakes that push up your Copilot bill

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