AI Metering Units: Microsoft Uses Many More Than Just Copilot Credits

• Consumption-based spending (where per-user licenses don’t cover everything) has expanded across many Microsoft services, especially AI offerings, such as agents.
• Microsoft AI services use several units to charge for metered usage, such as Copilot Credits and service-exclusive units.
• Units can be purchased using pay-as-you-go (PAYG) or via commitment purchasing.
• Customers should have at least a basic understanding of these units, although consumption is hard to predict.

Microsoft’s usage-based AI services employ numerous consumption units to determine costs. Customers are burdened with discovering which units are used with each service, learning how they’re consumed, predicting their usage (if possible), setting budgets, making pre-purchases (in some scenarios), monitoring consumption, and ensuring that alerts are configured and addressed when generated.

Metered AI Consumption Units

Charging for AI offerings based on metered usage in addition to or instead of per-user licenses (User SLs) is a growing practice across Microsoft offerings. Some services, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, provide a core feature set with a User SL but employ metered usage for other features, such as Cowork. Other services, such as GitHub Copilot, provide an allotted number of consumption units with a User SL, and customers must purchase additional units after those are depleted to continue using the services. Numerous consumption units are employed, and their similar names and terms can be confusing. Some units are used by multiple services (see fig. 1).