Linked – SharePoint Agents PAYG costs
As part of my job, I spend a lot of time trying to understand M365 tools like Copilot. Microsoft doesn’t always make it easy, but thankfully, folks are sharing insights like this one.
Copilot agents are challenging to grasp because, much like Copilot, many different things are called “Agents.”
Some are free for Copilot for M365 license holders but not for non-license holders. Some are free to everyone. Some involve a consumption charge, etc.
This gets us to the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) costs, which are also confusing because there is a cost associated with a non-licensed user interacting with a Copilot SharePoint agent of $.01 per message. However, one interaction is likely to include 32 messages. Since the non-licensed user has the same features as the licensed user, it’s imperative to understand where the use of a SharePoint agent for that user will cross the $30 per month threshold and where it would make more sense to license them. From the article below:
Thus, with each interaction being $0.32, let say that typically a user will interact with SharePoint agents three times during any inquiry. That makes it about $1 per enquiry. If we now say that an average user will make 20 inquiries per day, that is $20 per user per day. Multiply that across all the users in an organisation and you can see how it could get very expensive very quickly.
The trick is understanding how much users can expect to interact with SharePoint agents. I’m not sure we can do that very well. My experience with AI is that some users take to it and want to use it to assist with their work, and others try it, don’t like it, and rarely use it. My predictions for which ones fall on each side of that line have been pretty inaccurate. Regarding SharePoint agents, we can add the relative unknown of how good our data in SharePoint is as another variable.
There is no easy answer. The best thing I would recommend, and that I’ve seen others suggest is to keep a close eye on the billing information in Azure. See – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-agents-azure-billing#monitor-consumption-in-azure-cost-management.
Yeah, it’s work. So much of Copilot is work behind the scenes. The $30 per month cost per license is just the icing on the AI cake. The actual cost of ownership is the work involved in Information Governance and Security, planning, training, etc. You should never forget that when integrating any new technology, especially with AI.
For more content dedicated to M365, subscribe to Mike McBride on M365.
Follow these topics: Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft
