March 9, 2026
BlogM365 E7 to Launch May 1 for $99 Per User Per Month
Microsoft will launch a new, high-end Microsoft 365 licensing tier, Microsoft 365 E7, on May 1, priced at US$99 per user per month. For that price, customers will get all the features in Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 — as well as all the network access, identity protection and governance features in the Entra Suite — in a single bundle.
In addition to including its Agent 365 control plane in E7, Microsoft also plans to make Agent 365 available to IT and security professionals on May 1 as a separate add-on, priced at US$15 per user per month. Microsoft’s current top-of-the-line M365 licensing bundle is E5, which as of July 1, will be $60 per user per month and does not include the US $30 per user per month M365 Copilot. To date, only three percent of Microsoft’s 450 million commercial M365 customers have purchased Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Microsoft did not disclose any details about how or if agents will be licensed as part of M365 E7. Sources had said Microsoft was looking at some kind of hybrid per-user and consumption, or metered, licensing model for E7. So far, however, the company has not talked about the details for providing agents with their own Teams, OneDrive, and e-mail accounts, as Microsoft officials have indicated will be necessary for at least some agents, (We asked Microsoft for more information on the licensing for digital agents, but no word back so far.)
Microsoft announced its E7 and Agent 365 plans on March 9, a week after Directions on Microsoft and others heard from our contacts that the new E7 bundle was coming soon.
On March 4, CEO Satya Nadella did touch on this topic during his appearance at a Morgan Stanley tech conference.
When it comes to “digital workers,” Nadella said, “I think the combination of subscriptions with some limits of usage plus a meter is where I think we will end up. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a person or an agent. And I think the first place where this is happening already with the business models is in coding. And I think information work also will happen. So from a TAM (total addressable market) expansive perspective, for us, I look at all agents as users and with maybe more flexibility on how people license that.”
Agent 365 is one key to this coming subscription model. Agent 365 — which is currently in preview as part of Microsoft’s “Frontier” test program — is not a service. It’s a set of features including identity management using Entra, compliance controls using Purview, and security infrastructure using Defender XDR. Agent 365 supports agents built using Microsoft tools, third-party and open-source frameworks, and those running in partner clouds.
Copilot Cowork: Claude Cowork Meets M365 Copilot
On March 9, Microsoft also took the wraps off plans for a new feature coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot called “Copilot Cowork.” Copilot Cowork is built on the technology that powers Claude Cowork and was co-developed by Microsoft and Anthropic. Copilot Cowork will help customers handle “long-running, multi-step tasks,” Microsoft officials said. Copilot Cowork is currently in private pilot with select customers and will be available later in March as a research preview via Microsoft’‘s Frontier test program.
Last fall, Anthropic announced a connector for Claude and Microsoft 365. But this new integration between the two product families doesn’t require separate connectors or integration.
Copilot Cowork will work in conjunction with the built-in ““agentic experiences”“ (technology Microsoft previously referred to as “Agent Mode”) in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook that also are meant to assist with multi-step tasks. Both Claude and Open AI models are available in Copilot Chat, and can work alongside Microsoft’s own dedicated Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents, which are meant to help specifically with document creation inside those applications.
Even though Microsoft has a long-standing partnership with OpenAI to build products and services on top of OpenAI’s GPT technology, it has been hedging its AI bets by working more closely with and investing in Anthropic in recent months. Earlier this year, Anthropic made Claude Cowork available on Windows, leading some industry watchers to wonder whether Claude Cowork might prove to be more useful than Microsoft’s own M365 Copilot and agents for helping automate tasks for knowledge workers.
