Copilot is a tenant tax, not a second ChatGPT

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an add-on to a tenant you already pay for. It drafts in Outlook, trims a Word memo, and writes a Teams recap. That is the job. It is not a cheaper ChatGPT, and it is not a reason to move an empty company onto Microsoft. I keep seeing shops buy the SKU because the deck said “AI in the flow of work,” then watch people paste the same prompt into a browser tab they already had.

List price sits around thirty dollars a user a month, on top of the Microsoft stack you already administer. ChatGPT Team is about twenty-five. Claude and Gemini have their own cheap tabs. If the team does not live in Word and Outlook all day, you are paying a tenant tax for a pane.

The useful jobs are already in the tenant

A reply that starts from an eleven-message thread is useful because nobody pasted the history into a browser. A one-page rewrite of a buried recommendation is useful because the ask finally sits in paragraph one. A recap with owners is useful if you read it the same hour, before a joke becomes a ticket. Those are Copilot jobs. They only exist if the file, the mail, and the meeting are already Microsoft’s.

The miss is always the same shape. The recap assigns a decision to the last person who said “works for me,” who was talking about a different week. The memo grows a “journey” sentence nobody in the company would say. The chat pane, used like ChatGPT, is fine and slightly corporate, and it does not justify the SKU. I wrote that up in the Copilot lab notes. The calculator on this site will show you the annual line if you still need the number in a budget thread.

Seat math that survives a finance review

• Count only the people who already live in Word, Outlook, and Teams. Not the whole headcount.
• Subtract any general-model seats you would keep anyway. Copilot does not replace those for jump-around work.
• If the remainder is a handful of execs who wanted a demo, you bought a pane. Kill the SKU.
• If the remainder is the company, and the recaps are actually used, the tax is honest.

Skip this seat if

Skip Copilot if the team lives in Google or in a browser tab and you would only add this as a second ChatGPT. Skip it if you will publish the Teams recap without reading the owners. Skip it if you wanted a novel, a brand CMS, or a twenty-dollar personal seat. Buy it when the work is already in the tenant, and keep a human on every date and every name.