AB-900 Copilot and Agent Features: Licensing vs Pay-As-You-Go, Admin Settings, Researcher and Analyst

Copilot is a general-purpose AI assistant for a broad range of tasks; an agent is a version of Copilot focused on one job, packaged with its own instructions, chosen knowledge sources and, for more advanced agents, actions. Everything else stays the same: an agent runs on the same Copilot foundation models and orchestration, and it reaches organizational data the same way Copilot does.

Agents answer with the asking user's permissions

Naming a SharePoint site as an agent's knowledge source tells the agent where to look; it grants nobody new access. When someone asks a question, the agent uses only the content that person can already open. If a finance agent's site holds a board pack that only directors can open, a non-director's answers are built from the rest of the site as though the board pack weren't there. The same agent can therefore give two people different answers to the same question, because each answer reflects what that person is allowed to see.

Agents appear in the Microsoft Copilot app (formerly the Microsoft 365 Copilot app) and in apps such as Teams, Outlook and SharePoint. Microsoft also ships two built-in, first-party agents, Researcher and Analyst, covered later in this lesson.

Every Microsoft 365 work account includes Copilot Chat, which is grounded in the web; the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on license adds automatic grounding in the user's work data through Microsoft Graph and the full Copilot experience inside the apps. Microsoft has renamed the app and its tiers several times (the app is now Microsoft Copilot, and tiers may be labelled Basic or Premium), so focus on what each tier can reach rather than on a label.

The deciding factor is what the tier can reach, not how anything is configured. Without the add-on, a user can still bring work content into a chat by attaching or pasting it; automatic reach into mail, meetings, chats and files across Microsoft 365 comes only with the Microsoft 365 Copilot license. That license is an add-on: no Microsoft 365 or Office 365 suite plan includes it, whatever the suite's size.

Microsoft's current comparison also lists a middle tier, Microsoft 365 Copilot (Basic), under which some users without the add-on get standard, non-priority Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It still lacks automatic Microsoft Graph grounding in the user's work data and priority access, which stay with the add-on license (Premium). If you see Copilot buttons in an unlicensed user's Word, that is this standard access, not the full licensed experience.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot license is a fixed monthly charge per named user, whatever that user does; Copilot pay-as-you-go has no seat cost and bills actual usage, measured by meters, to an Azure subscription. Pay-as-you-go is not a prepaid commitment, and its charges don't appear per message on the Microsoft 365 license invoice.

The key limit: pay-as-you-go does not give anyone the licensed in-app experience in Word, Excel or Teams meetings. Compare expected use per person with the fixed seat cost: steady, all-day use across the apps is what a seat is priced for, while light use spread across many people usually costs less when billed per use. Many organizations mix the two, licensing the people who need the full experience and covering everyone else's metered agent use through pay-as-you-go. Microsoft also lists pay-as-you-go as a way to establish usage patterns before deciding how many licenses to buy, which suits a company that doesn't yet know its demand.

The Azure meters include Copilot Chat (agents), SharePoint agents and the Microsoft 365 Copilot Retrieval API. Prepaid Copilot Studio capacity is an alternative way to pay for metered agent use. Creating, connecting and monitoring billing policies is covered in the lesson on Copilot and agent administration.

For users without a Copilot license, an agent's knowledge source decides whether it costs anything: agents built only from instructions and public websites are available in Copilot Chat at no extra cost, while agents grounded in shared tenant data (SharePoint content, connectors and similar) are metered, are off by default, and need a billing source. For users with a license, agent use is covered by the license and needs no action.

Two consequences follow. First, metering depends on the knowledge an agent draws on, not on the tool used to build it: any agent that reaches into SharePoint or connector content is metered for unlicensed users, whichever builder made it. Second, a work-data agent that licensed colleagues can use is not automatically usable by unlicensed colleagues, even when they can open the underlying content: metered use is switched on only once there is a billing source to charge it to.

Every SharePoint site can have agents that answer from that site's content, and Microsoft separates creating an agent from using it: creating needs a Copilot license and permission to add files to the site, while configuring and interacting with an agent needs a Copilot license or pay-as-you-go billing.

Billing and permissions both follow the user, not the agent. The maker's license covers only the maker's own use; each other person's use is covered by their own license or, if they have none, billed through pay-as-you-go. Likewise, each person's answers draw only on site content that person can open, whatever the maker can see.

Most organization-wide Copilot switches sit on the Copilot page of the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Settings; some entries there are shortcuts that open another admin center where the real control lives. The ones to know:

Controls that sound related but govern something else

Each Copilot switch above has one job, and the controls around it don't substitute for it. Preview Copilot features are governed only by Copilot Frontier; release rings such as Targeted release and the Insider channels concern Microsoft 365 updates and Office builds in general. Where Copilot appears (pinning, app placement) is separate from what it is allowed to do. Sign-in rules and browser policies govern access to apps and the browser experience, not what Copilot grounds its answers in. Restricted Content Discovery hides chosen SharePoint sites from Copilot and organization-wide search for everyone; it works at site level only, so it can't target mailboxes or narrow Copilot to one library. When a scenario names a capability, find the setting that names the same capability.

Web search applies everywhere, Researcher included

Disabling Allow web search in Copilot removes web grounding across Copilot and Copilot Chat for all license types. It doesn't block mailbox or file grounding, and it doesn't stop Researcher: Researcher honours the setting and builds its report from work content only. There is no per-site allow or block list for Researcher's web use; the web is allowed as a whole or not at all.

Whether Copilot works in Teams meetings, and whether it needs a saved transcript, is set by the Copilot setting in the organizer's Teams meeting policy, which has four values. Most of them only set the organizer's default in meeting options; just one enforces its choice.

Two points catch admins out. Off is not a hard block: it only starts the organizer's option at Off, so Copilot can still appear in a meeting the organizer chose to enable. And the decision belongs to the organizer's policy and meeting options, not each attendee's policy; a transcription policy affects how Copilot works where it is allowed but doesn't override the Copilot value. The Microsoft 365 admin center's "Copilot in Teams meetings" entry is only a shortcut to the Teams admin center.

Researcher is a built-in reasoning agent for complex, multi-step research: it gathers and analyzes information from work content (files, emails, meetings, chats and connector content the user can access) and, if allowed, the web, then writes a structured report with citations. It deliberately takes longer than standard Copilot because it plans, retrieves and checks before it writes.

Good fits for Researcher:

• A cited competitive or market briefing that combines public news with the company's own plans, emails and meeting notes.
• Pulling together everything known about a customer, project or proposal across many sources.
• A go-to-market or strategy draft that must show where each claim came from.

Poor fits: quick tasks such as summarizing one email or drafting a two-line reply (use standard Copilot, which is optimized for speed), number crunching in spreadsheets (use Analyst), and routine questions over one site with fixed rules (use a custom agent).

Researcher is a first-party agent: it comes with the Microsoft 365 Copilot license and is pre-installed. Its logic, instructions and sources can't be customized, in Copilot Studio or anywhere else, so fixed rules or narrower sources call for a custom agent instead. Users can't uninstall it; an admin can block it on the Agents page of the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Analyst is a built-in reasoning agent for data analysis: it works through raw data in Excel workbooks, CSV files and other data, across several files at once, runs Python to do the calculations, and shows the code it ran so you can check its work. It turns that data into forecasts, trends, outliers and charts.

Good fits for Analyst:

• Building a customer retention table from a year of subscription sign-up and cancellation exports.
• Testing whether website conversions move with marketing spend across several monthly spreadsheets.
• Combining several exports into one view and charting the trend, with the calculation visible.

Like Researcher, Analyst is pre-installed with the license, can't be customized and can't be removed by users, and an admin can block it on its own. Blocking one doesn't affect the other, so the per-agent block is the precise tool whenever an organization wants one of the two without the other; broader controls change far more than a single agent.

Choosing the right Copilot experience

A custom agent fits when the same job recurs for many people and needs fixed instructions (tone, format, rules), scoped knowledge (one site, library or set of files), or actions in other systems. It stores those once, so everyone gets the same behaviour without uploading files or retyping rules into every prompt.

Which tool to build it in depends on what the agent must do:

A custom agent is also the route when people want a built-in agent to behave differently. Researcher and Analyst can't be modified, so the answer is to build an agent that carries the required instructions and knowledge; tenant-wide controls change everyone's experience rather than one agent's behaviour. Creating, approving and monitoring agents is covered in the lesson on Copilot and agent administration.