The dedicated Copilot key on a Windows laptop keyboard. Image: DigitalIceAge / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Microsoft is about to make its Copilot AI assistant a lot cheaper for large companies. According to The Information, the company has authorised its sales teams to offer discounts of 30% to 50% on Copilot subscriptions for corporate customers who buy in bulk, timed to coincide with the launch of its new Copilot “super app.”
The discounts
Microsoft leaders told sales staff this week that they can offer steeper discounts to businesses that commit to buying a large number of seats, along with additional payments. The reported tiers are:
- 30% off for customers buying between 1,000 and 10,000 seats
- 50% off for those buying 10,000 seats or more
The discounts are set to take effect in October, GuruFocus reports. The reports didn’t include any comment from Microsoft.
Enter the super app
The price cuts line up with Microsoft’s long-promised Copilot super app, which is expected to launch this week. It pulls Copilot’s chat, AI coding tools and agents that can carry out tasks on your behalf, similar to OpenAI’s, into a single application. Some features will cost extra depending on how much customers use them.
It’s the next step in a consolidation that began in August, when Microsoft started merging its consumer Copilot app and its business Microsoft 365 Copilot app into one app that handles both personal and work accounts, GeekWire reported. CEO Satya Nadella told investors on the company’s July 29 earnings call that the super app would be out this quarter, meaning by the end of September.
Why now?
Deep discounts on a flagship product rarely signal that it’s flying off the shelves. Copilot has been Microsoft’s big bet for turning AI into subscription revenue from the businesses that already pay for Office, but it now faces pressure from every direction: cheaper frontier models, like the half-price GPT-6 Sol and Luna from Microsoft’s own partner OpenAI and Anthropic’s newly cheaper Claude Opus 5.5, plus rival AI tools that companies are buying directly.
Bundling everything into one app and cutting the price for the biggest customers looks like an attempt to lock in large companies before they standardise on something else. The catch is in the fine print: the biggest savings come with big commitments, and the usage-based charges could claw some of that back.
Sources: The Information, GuruFocus, GeekWire