Is Microsoft Copilot free? Copilot Chat vs Microsoft 365 Copilot

Partly. Copilot Chat is free with Microsoft 365: anyone who signs in with an eligible work account can use it at no extra cost. Copilot that works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams and draws on your own emails, files and meetings is paid, either as an add-on such as Microsoft 365 Copilot Business or Microsoft 365 Copilot, or bundled into Business Standard or Business Premium with Copilot.

The confusion is understandable. Microsoft uses the word “Copilot” for a free consumer app, a free chat tool for work accounts and several paid business licences. If you run a Kenyan SME, school, NGO or professional firm, the question that matters is simpler: what do your staff get today with the licences you already pay for, and what would you need to buy to get more? This guide answers both, using Microsoft’s published plan details, and explains how we help you decide before you spend anything.

Consumer Copilot and work Copilot are different things

The Copilot your staff may already use on their phones with a personal Microsoft account is a consumer product, and it is not the same as Copilot for work. When someone signs in with a personal Hotmail or Outlook.com address, they are outside your organisation’s accounts, your admin settings and your business agreement with Microsoft.

That matters if staff paste client details, payroll figures or patient notes into it. Your IT team cannot see, manage or switch off what happens in a personal account. For any work task, the rule we suggest to clients is plain: sign in with the work account, not the personal one.

The work version starts with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Microsoft makes it available at no additional cost to every Microsoft Entra ID user with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, and describes it as coming with IT controls and enterprise-grade privacy and security. In other words, it runs under your organisation’s sign-in, so access starts and stops with the staff accounts you already manage.

What is free: Copilot Chat with your work account

Copilot Chat is the free part, and it is included in the Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans most Kenyan organisations already have. Microsoft lists it, under various descriptions, in Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, Apps for business, E3, E5, F1 and F3, and in the education plans for staff and eligible students signed in with a school account.

According to Microsoft’s plan pages, Copilot Chat gives your staff:

• AI chat with web grounding. Answers drawn from current web information and Microsoft’s latest language models.
• Writing help and data analysis. Draft a letter to a supplier, tidy a policy, or ask questions about a spreadsheet you upload (file upload limits apply).
• Copilot Pages. A shared space to keep and edit what Copilot produces.
• IT controls and enterprise-grade privacy and security, because staff use it with their work account.
• Access to agents, with one catch explained below.

What Copilot Chat does not do on its own is read your organisation’s own data. It does not search your mailbox, summarise last week’s Teams meeting or pull figures from the board pack in SharePoint. Microsoft says that adding a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence is what grounds Copilot Chat in your work data. That difference is most of what you pay for.

The catch: agents are metered

Agents inside Copilot Chat are not free. Microsoft states that an Azure subscription is required to use agents, and they are priced on a metered basis, so you pay for what they consume. If you plan to build your own agents, that runs through Microsoft Copilot tools such as Copilot Studio, which is sold as credit packs or pay-as-you-go. For most organisations starting out, plain Copilot Chat is enough to learn what AI can do before anyone signs up for a meter.

Some Copilot in the Office apps, without the add-on

Microsoft now describes a middle tier. Depending on your licence and tenant settings, some users without the paid add-on get “standard access” to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, for tasks such as drafting, rewriting and summarising the document in front of them. Microsoft says standard access depends on service capacity and can vary through the day, and it does not ground answers in your organisation’s email and files (Microsoft Learn: What is Microsoft Copilot?, checked 4 October 2026). The paid licence adds priority access and work-data grounding.

What about Microsoft 365 Personal and Family?

The home plans are a separate case. Microsoft announced in January 2025 that Copilot is included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family in most markets, with a monthly allowance of AI credits for Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, and only the subscription owner on a Family plan gets it (Microsoft Copilot blog, checked 4 October 2026). These are personal licences, though, so they don’t belong on company work, and they don’t give your organisation any control over the data.

What is paid: Copilot in your apps and your data

You pay when you want Copilot to work inside your Microsoft 365 apps with your own emails, files, chats and meetings. Microsoft sells this in three ways for business customers, and the right one depends on your plan and how many staff need it.

1. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business (add-on, up to 300 users)

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is an add-on for organisations on an eligible Microsoft 365 Business plan, for up to 300 users. It brings Copilot into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, AI chat powered by Work IQ, reasoning for research and data analysis, pre-built agents including Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator, adoption analytics and a choice of language model. Through Priori it is KES 2,223 per user per month. Microsoft is running a first-year promotional price on this add-on until 31 December 2026 for existing customers with an eligible Business plan, on an annual commitment; the price shown here reflects whichever price applies on the day you read it.

2. Business Standard or Business Premium with Copilot (bundles)

Microsoft now sells two bundles with Copilot built in: Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot and Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot. Each includes everything in the base plan plus Copilot in the apps, AI chat grounded in your work data and the pre-built agents. Business Standard with Copilot is KES 2,903 and Business Premium with Copilot is KES 3,952 per user per month. A bundle is simpler to manage when every user on that plan needs Copilot.

3. Microsoft 365 Copilot (enterprise add-on)

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the add-on for organisations on a qualifying plan such as E3 or E5, with no 300-user cap. Alongside Copilot in the apps, Microsoft lists AI-powered search across your work data using more than 100 connectors, Copilot Notebooks, image and video generation aligned to your brand, broader access to agents including custom agents, and SharePoint Advanced Management with Copilot Analytics. It is KES 3,705 per user per month, and it is already included in Microsoft 365 E7.

Copilot plans and prices side by side

The table below shows the free option next to the paid ones, with Priori prices excluding VAT. All of them are 5% below the standard price, and we invoice in KES or USD. See Microsoft 365 pricing for how billing, VAT and currency work.

What you want	Copilot Chat (free)	Paid Copilot
Chat with web answers and writing help	Yes	Yes
Upload a file and ask about it	Yes (limits apply)	Yes
Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams	No	Yes
Answers grounded in your own email, files and meetings	No	Yes
Pre-built agents such as Researcher and Analyst	Metered agents only	Yes
Adoption and usage analytics	No	Yes
Signs in with your work account	Yes	Yes

Availability is confirmed for your tenant before you commit

Before you pay for any Copilot licence, we confirm availability for your tenant and plan. Microsoft’s paid Copilot products come with eligibility rules: Copilot Business needs an eligible Business plan, Microsoft 365 Copilot needs a qualifying plan, and the promotional add-on price applies only to existing eligible customers in its first year. Buying through a partner also depends on what our distributor can supply for your tenant at the time.

So the order we follow with every client is: check your current plans, confirm which Copilot option your tenant can take, quote it in KES or USD, and only then ask you to commit. You should never be left holding an annual commitment for a licence that cannot be assigned.

Which option fits your organisation?

Most organisations should start with free Copilot Chat and add paid Copilot only for the people whose work clearly benefits. Here is how that plays out in common Kenyan settings.

• A 15-person consultancy on Business Standard. Everyone uses Copilot Chat for drafting and research. The two partners who write long proposals and sit in back-to-back Teams meetings get the Copilot Business add-on, because meeting recaps and drafting from their own files save them real hours.
• A SACCO or clinic on Business Premium. Data protection matters more than speed. Staff use Copilot Chat with work accounts only, and the security settings in Premium stay in charge of who sees what. Paid Copilot waits until permissions on shared files have been cleaned up.
• A new office setting up from scratch where everyone writes reports. Business Standard or Business Premium with Copilot can be simpler than buying a base plan plus an add-on for every person.
• A larger organisation on E3 or E5. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the add-on to evaluate, starting with a pilot group rather than every seat.
• A school or non-profit. Education and non-profit pricing for Copilot is separate. Ask us before you buy at business rates.

Before you pay: get your data ready

Paid Copilot can only show a person what that person already has permission to open, so messy file sharing becomes visible fast. If a folder of salary letters was shared with “everyone” years ago, Copilot will happily surface it to anyone who asks the right question. That is not a Copilot flaw; it is the old permission problem made easier to find.

Before a pilot we look at who can see what in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, tighten anything shared too widely, and make sure multifactor sign-in is on for every account. Our Copilot readiness service covers this, followed by short training so staff know how to write good prompts and check Copilot’s work. Copilot drafts; people still decide.

How to try Copilot without wasting licences

Start small and measure. Ask everyone to use free Copilot Chat with their work account for a month, and note which tasks it helps with. Then choose a pilot group of five to ten heavy users of email, meetings and documents, and give only them the paid licence, and agree the commitment term with us before you start. Copilot Business and Microsoft 365 Copilot both include analytics on usage, so you can see whether people actually use it before you extend it to more seats at renewal. Microsoft lists the qualifying plans, the licence-assignment steps and its Copilot setup guide in the admin center on one page (Microsoft Learn: License options for Microsoft Copilot, checked 4 October 2026).

We stay with you through the pilot: setting it up, training the group and reviewing the results with you, so the licences you buy are the ones that pay off.