AB-900 lesson 9: Copilot, agents and billing

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a per-user add-on licence that grounds answers in a person’s own work data, while agents are focused versions of Copilot with their own instructions, knowledge and skills. Copilot Chat arrives with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, and its web-based chat costs nothing extra. Pay-as-you-go is the third option: usage is metered and billed to an Azure subscription, so people without a Copilot licence can still use certain agents.

What is built in and what is added on

Think of three layers. Copilot Chat is the base: it answers from the internet, and without a Copilot licence it reaches work content only when the user supplies it, for example by uploading a file or using an open item in Outlook or Teams, or when a pay-as-you-go agent has access. The licence is the second layer: it grounds Copilot automatically in the work content the signed-in user can already access, and brings full Copilot into apps such as Word, Outlook and Teams. Agents are the third layer, sitting on top of either.

The agent management documentation draws a useful line: a Copilot Chat subscription gives users agents that use web data, while the Copilot licence gives both web data agents and work data agents. An exam question that says “an agent must read internal files” is therefore also a licensing question.

Researcher, Analyst and custom agents

Researcher and Analyst are Microsoft-built reasoning experiences. Researcher takes longer on purpose, works across the web and the work content the user may access, and returns a structured report with cited sources. Analyst is the one for data: give it spreadsheets or tables and it works through them to find patterns and explain them. A custom agent is the answer when one narrow job repeats over the same content, such as questions about the travel policy.

Researcher and Analyst sit in the core Copilot chat experience, so agent-specific settings do not govern them. To remove them, an admin blocks the agent for the whole tenant; the per-user “edit users” panel is disabled for both.

Which features an admin can switch on or off

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Copilot section has a Settings page organised into tabs: User access, Data access, Copilot actions and Other settings. Examples of what lives there:

• Image generation and screen and camera sharing can be allowed or turned off.
• Self-service purchase of a Copilot licence can be allowed, limited to trials, or disallowed.
• Frontier, the early-access programme for experimental features, defaults to no access.
• Web search is a shortcut to a cloud policy in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center; it is not toggled in the main admin center.
• Agent access is configured under the agent settings, covered in lesson 11.

Worked example: a 250-person company

A 250-person consultancy has 30 people in sales who draft proposals all day, and a SharePoint site that holds the travel and expense policy for everyone else. Licensing all 250 people for occasional policy questions would waste money. The admin assigns 30 monthly licences to the sales group. For the other 220 employees, the admin creates a pay-as-you-go billing policy tied to an Azure subscription, connects it to SharePoint agents, and sets a budget with email alerts. Unlicensed users can then use the SharePoint agent, and spend shows up on the Cost Management page.

Edge cases: with licences but no pay-as-you-go, unlicensed users cannot use SharePoint agents; with neither a licence nor pay-as-you-go, nobody can create or use them. Creating one needs a licence plus the ability to add files to the site.

Easy to confuse

• Licence vs billing policy. A licence belongs to a named user. A billing policy belongs to a group of users and an Azure subscription.
• Creating the policy vs connecting it. A new billing policy does nothing until it is connected to a service. Pay-as-you-go is also off by default.
• Researcher vs Analyst. Sources and a report versus numbers and patterns.

Key points

• Copilot Chat is included and answers from the web; automatic work data grounding and full in-app Copilot need the licence.
• Agents combine instructions, knowledge and skills; the licence unlocks work data agents.
• Researcher suits multi-source research reports, Analyst suits data analysis, custom agents suit repeated jobs on fixed content.
• Pay-as-you-go needs a billing policy, an Azure subscription and a connection to a supported service.
• Settings sit under Copilot > Settings in the admin center, and some are shortcuts.

Check yourself

This lesson belongs to the Copilot and agents domain (25 to 30 percent of AB-900). The condensed version is on the Copilot and agent admin recap, and Copilot, Copilot Studio and Foundry compared adds product context.