Microsoft has made Copilot Cowork: the workspace where agents carry out multi-step tasks on their own: generally available, and changed its cost model at the same time. Since 1 July 2026, usage has been billed by consumption rather than through a flat fee.
Why this is more than a pricing question
Consumption-based billing behaves differently from a per-seat licence: costs depend on how intensively agents actually work, and that is hard to estimate in advance. A single employee who regularly has an agent work through large data sets can generate more cost than twenty occasional users.
Environments that merely tried Cowork are explicitly affected: anyone who worked in Cowork with a Frontier account during the transition window between late March and mid-June falls into the billing scope.
What to do now
- Review spending limits at tenant, group and user level. Without a cap there is no natural brake.
- Clarify who actually needs Cowork. The workspace pays off for recurring, multi-step processes. Not for individual questions to a chat.
- Evaluate consumption after two or three weeks and adjust the limits, rather than setting them once.
Our assessment
Agentic work is the real step forward: no longer asking and answering, but handing over a task and reviewing the result. That is precisely why the cost logic changes too, from a predictable licence to a line item that grows with usage.
For mid-sized companies this means: first a clearly defined use case, then approval for a small group, then expansion backed by solid figures. Doing it the other way round means learning the costs from the invoice instead of from the plan.