Microsoft has quietly turned Copilot from an optional extra into a standard part of its small business plans. Since 1 July 2026, "Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot" and "Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot" have been permanent, always-on plans sitting alongside the existing ones — and if you'd rather add Copilot to a plan you already have, the discounted add-on price of $18 per user per month (list price $21) is only available until 30 September 2026. After that, new customers pay full price. If your business is on Microsoft 365 and hasn't looked at this yet, it's worth ten minutes before the deadline passes.
What actually changed
Until this year, Copilot was something you bolted onto Microsoft 365 as a separate, fairly expensive add-on. Microsoft has now baked it directly into new plan tiers:
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot — around $23.50 per user per month.
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot — around $32 per user per month.
- Copilot as a standalone add-on to an existing Business Standard or Premium subscription — $18 per user per month promotional rate (list price $21) for organisations up to 300 seats, but only if you commit before 30 September 2026.
The bundled plans are usually cheaper than paying for the base plan and the add-on separately, so if you're going to use Copilot at all, the bundle is worth comparing against your current setup. The catch on the discounted add-on: it requires an annual commitment, and the promotional price applies to the first year only — it resets to list price at renewal.
Why this is different from the price rise you may have already seen
We wrote about the broader 12% Microsoft 365 price increase back in August, which affected the base Business Standard licence regardless of Copilot. This is a separate decision layered on top: whether to add AI features to those licences at all, and if so, whether to do it before the current promotional window closes. You can ignore Copilot entirely and your base subscription is unaffected — but if leadership has been "meaning to look into Copilot," the discount ending in a few weeks is a reasonable forcing function to actually make the call.
What Copilot in Microsoft 365 Business actually does
For a typical Perth small business, the practical uses are:
- Word, Excel and PowerPoint: drafting and rewriting documents, summarising long spreadsheets, building first-draft slide decks from notes.
- Outlook: summarising long email threads and drafting replies in your tone.
- Teams: meeting summaries and action items, even for meetings you couldn't attend.
- Copilot Chat: a general-purpose assistant that can also pull in your organisation's own files and emails when asked (which is exactly why the governance step below matters).
It's genuinely useful for admin-heavy roles — office managers, bookkeepers, anyone drafting a lot of documents or chasing meeting notes. It's much less compelling for a two-person tradie business running mostly on-site.
Before you sign anything, check these three things
- Who actually needs a seat. Copilot licensing is per-user, so it's usually not worth licensing your whole team on day one. Start with the handful of roles that will use it daily and expand later — that's cheaper than licensing everyone and finding out most people never open it.
- Your data permissions are the real risk, not the AI itself. Copilot answers using whatever files and emails the logged-in user already has permission to see. If your SharePoint and OneDrive permissions have drifted over the years — folders shared too broadly, an old "everyone" link nobody remembers creating — Copilot will happily surface that in a summary. Tidying up access before rollout matters more than any setting inside Copilot itself.
- Whether the annual commitment suits you. The discounted add-on locks you in for twelve months at $18 per user per month before reverting to list price. If you're not confident the team will actually adopt it, a smaller pilot group is safer than committing the whole business to a year-long contract to catch a short-lived discount.
Our take
We're not going to tell every Perth business to rush out and add Copilot before the end of the month just because the price is dropping back — that's exactly the kind of decision that should follow, not lead, a look at whether your team would use it and whether your file permissions are in good shape. But if adopting Copilot was already on your radar for this year, the 30 September deadline is a legitimate reason to bring that decision forward rather than let it drift into next year's renewal at a higher price.
If you'd like a second opinion on whether Copilot is worth it for your team, or a hand tidying up SharePoint and OneDrive permissions before you switch it on, our cloud services and IT consulting teams can walk through it with you. We also cover the licensing side more broadly in our Microsoft 365 guide if you want the full picture before you commit.
We're a Perth-based team who've been supporting local businesses since 1997 — call us on (08) 9325 1196 if you'd rather talk it through than read another spec sheet.
