I’m not usually one for clickbait titles on blog posts, but I hope this one got your attention. Here’s a little story of Cowork, budgets and user adoption.

Cowork had been in preview for some time, and my team were keen early adopters, discovering a wide range of uses. On the 1^st of July, Microsoft introduced consumption pricing for Copilot Cowork and almost immediately we started noticing an issue.

I overheard a conversation about an awesome use case for Cowork. A schedule process that ran every day picking up ticket notifications from our job management system and helping prioritise tasks. I love the idea, but how much did it cost?

Copilot Cowork costs are based on the size of the task you give it, but you can’t easily see how much something will cost until you do it. Each credit costs $US0.01. A rough guide on unit consumption is:

• Simple task costs between 100-300 credits
• Medium task costs between 300-700 credits
• Complex tasks cost more than 700 credits

That’s right, a simple task could cost you $US3. The question is, did you really ask it to do something simple? You won’t know until after the job is done! I used Cowork to populate a project report from timesheet data in a spreadsheet. The costs varied from 358-450 credits. Now multiply this by the many tasks each person with Cowork runs each day to get an order of magnitude of the potential costs.

TIP: Use the /Cost prompt to get the costs after running a task.

You see the problem here is that like most businesses, we have a budget. It covers purchasing licensing including M365 Copilot or Claude for our team, but we didn’t have anything allocated to consumption billing, simply because it wasn’t a thing when we did the budget.

We decided to allocate what we thought was a reasonable amount because we didn’t want to stop people using tools where there is value and productivity improvements. As the meme says “…few moments later…” (less than 3 days), we had spent every cent. How did we do that!?

It turns out people were using Cowork for things that M365 Copilot does a pretty good job of. Things that didn’t really need Cowork to get the productivity gain. We didn’t add more budget, we told our team how much they had used and talked about the alternatives with our top users. We explained when to use M365 Copilot where the costs are fixed and then a bit of time to adapt before extending our budget for Cowork. Having this knowledge is important as it lets people make informed decisions. The general reaction, was I had no idea how this cost. For some tasks Cowork was doing, it makes a lot of sense, but others not so much.

It’s now 8 days into August and we haven’t blown the budget, in-fact we have decreased our daily spend on Cowork. Our Accountant is going to love that! There has also be a usage change, more M365 Copilot, which has a fixed cost. People are changing the way they work, rather than giving up and going back to the old ways of working!

In the M365 Admin Centre, you can allocate spending budgets to groups within your business and allocate budgets to give you visibility of where the spend is happening. I’d suggest creating groups for each department and enabling this along side a change management process to raise awareness and train everyone before letting them lose! Avoid turning it on for everyone in the tenant as it becomes immediately available for anyone with an M365 Copilot license if you do.

If you are implementing Cowork, it is 100% worth spending some time on user awareness and giving your people the information they need to make an informed decision on which tool to use when. Cowork is powerful and can save a lot of time, so don’t say no completely but make sure you set out some expectations first. Focus on where Cowork delivers value and understand which tool to use when.

You can learn more about Copilot Cowork on this webinar I presented recently. Watch the reactions when I reveal the cost of the task I gave Cowork! I also talk about when to use M365 Copilot vs Cowork and run through the admin controls towards the end.