If Copilot actually works as advertised, Microsoft loses seats. If it doesn't, you wasted the budget. Either way you're explaining it to leadership.

So Microsoft launched E7 last week. $99/user/month. It bundles E5, Copilot, and a new thing called Cowork that lets AI do multi-step tasks across your M365 apps in the background. Schedule meetings, build decks, prep reports, whatever. It checks in with you at checkpoints before executing. The interesting part that nobody seems to be talking about: Cowork isn't built by Microsoft. They licensed the entire execution engine from Anthropic (the Claude people). Microsoft spent $80 billion on AI last year, has OpenAI practically living in their codebase, and still went outside for this. Make of that what you will. But that's the tech story. The budget story is worse. E5 is going from $57 to $60 in July. Copilot add-on is $30 on top of that. So E5 plus Copilot is $90/user right now. E7 at $99 bundles everything together and adds Cowork on top. Sounds like a deal until you realize they just created a pricing tier that costs more than most companies were paying for the entire Office suite three years ago. Here's what I keep thinking about. The whole pitch for Copilot is that it makes people more productive. Some companies are already using that as justification to reduce headcount. Fewer people, fewer seats. But Microsoft's revenue depends on seat count. So either the productivity story is real and Microsoft loses seats, or the productivity story is marketing and companies keep paying $99/user for something that doesn't actually replace anyone. Either way you're the one explaining the budget to leadership. Only 3.3% of commercial M365 users are on paid Copilot right now. 15 million out of 450 million. Microsoft needs that number to move, badly. E7 feels like the play to get there (bundle it so deep into the stack that you can't really say no without losing security and compliance features you actually need). Are any of your orgs actually evaluating E7? Curious whether this is landing as a real conversation or if leadership is just ignoring it until renewal.