What changed
On September 25, Microsoft announced a redesigned Copilot built around three parts: Home for chat and quick tasks, Code for building apps with plain language, and Autopilot for persistent AI agents. Autopilot is an agent you name, give a role and a goal, and it keeps working across Microsoft 365 even when nobody is logged in. It can monitor Teams channels, follow email threads, run recurring tasks, and pick up unfinished work without a new prompt every time.
The change that matters for cost is the new billing model. Regular Copilot chat stays on per-user subscriptions. But Autopilot and the other long-running agent features now run on usage-based billing through Copilot Credits. The more the agent works, the more you pay. Microsoft says usage billing is off by default and administrators can set spending limits for the whole organization, teams, or individual users.
Autopilot enters private preview at the end of September. Home and Code reach early-access users first.
What you can do with it now
If your team has tasks that repeat every week but take too long to automate properly — pulling reports, checking for overdue invoices, updating project status in three different places — Autopilot can handle those overnight. You describe the task once, set the schedule, and the agent runs it while your team sleeps.
Start with one low-risk repeating task that currently wastes an hour every Friday: generating a weekly summary email, checking which clients have not responded in five days, or copying data from one system to another. Give Autopilot that task for one month and track what it costs. Compare the monthly bill to what you currently pay in salary hours for that same work. Do not scale until you know the real cost per task.
What to keep in your own hands
Usage-based billing means unpredictable costs. Set a spending cap before you turn Autopilot on, and make sure only the people who approve budgets can raise that cap. Otherwise one person could hand Autopilot ten tasks and blow your monthly software budget by Tuesday.
Do not let Autopilot access your financial records, payroll data, or customer payment details until you have tested it on safer tasks for at least two months. Check what data Autopilot stores and whether you can move it to another platform if Microsoft raises prices or changes the terms. And keep one person on your team who knows how to do the task manually — if the agent breaks or the bill gets too high, you need to be able to walk away and finish the work yourself.