Microsoft adds pay-as-you-go pricing to Cloud PCs for AI agents
Microsoft has launched pay-as-you-go pricing for Windows 365 for Agents. It costs $0.40 per hour per task, rounded up to the nearest hour. The model supports agent pools in Copilot Studio and agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, such as the Researcher. Billing runs through Azure, with 50 free hours available per tenant during the public preview. Tenants can create up to two pools, each holding a maximum of 10 Cloud PCs. Administrators must meet certain prerequisites to enable it. Pricing details may change as the preview continues.
Teams building AI agents previously needed dedicated Cloud PCs assigned like user licenses, locking in costs even for sporadic use. Mid-sized firms with low Copilot adoption balked at the expense, favouring free ChatGPT for tasks over experimental agents amid data governance worries. Pay-as-you-go billing matches costs to actual agent runtime, slashing barriers for no-code prototypes in Copilot Studio. This preview hands citizen developers free hours to test reliably, potentially turning agent builders into adoption champions without upfront budget fights.
Analysis
This preview is no silver bullet for your stalled Copilot rollout, but those 50 free hours let you sidestep $30/user cost debates and prototype a real agent that pulls meeting recaps from Teams. Badger IT for access today, then build one Copilot Studio agent on a SharePoint pool to demo next team huddle and claim your AI cred.
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