Microsoft has been pushing a clear message at small business customers over the past two weeks. Buy Microsoft 365 Copilot Business seats before 30 June 2026 and you lock in the promotional rate for a year. After that date the standard price kicks in, around 17% higher per user per month. For a ten-person team, the first-year saving runs into a few hundred pounds depending on your currency and plan mix.
That is a real number. It is also exactly the kind of nudge that gets businesses to buy AI seats they do not yet know how to use.
What is actually on offer
The promotion applies to Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, the small business version of the AI tool that sits across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack. It can be added to any Business Basic, Standard or Premium plan, up to 300 seats per tenant. The promotional rate requires an annual commitment, and the discount applies to the first year only. Microsoft has also flagged a 15% discount on the standalone Copilot Business add-on through the same deadline.
If you already pay for Microsoft 365 Business and were going to add Copilot in the next six months anyway, locking in is straightforward. If you were not already planning the purchase, the deadline pressure is the wrong reason to make the decision.
Where Copilot earns its keep, and where it does not
Across the small businesses we work with, three use cases for Copilot have actually stuck. Drafting and editing longer documents in Word from a prompt or a meeting summary. Pulling specific information out of an inbox or a long Teams thread. Building a first-pass Excel formula or pivot when nobody on the team would otherwise know where to start.
The use cases that have not stuck are the ones the marketing pages lead with. Auto-generating slide decks. Letting Copilot send emails on your behalf. The first produces output you still need to rewrite. The second tends to introduce errors faster than it saves time, and trust takes weeks to rebuild after one bad send.
The point is not that Copilot is a poor tool. It is that the value sits in a narrower set of workflows than the pricing page suggests, and you need to know which of those apply to your team before you commit twelve months of subscription. This is the same pattern we wrote about with the AI features inside your accounting software: businesses pay for capability they never set up.
Six questions to ask before 30 June
Before you click buy, walk through this:
- Which jobs in our business involve writing, summarising or searching through Microsoft documents and email every week?
- Who specifically would use Copilot, and what would they stop doing or do differently with it?
- Are we already paying for Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium, or would we need to upgrade first?
- Do we have the team appetite to spend an hour learning where Copilot actually helps, or will the seats sit dormant?
- What is the worst case if we wait three months and pay the higher price on five seats instead of fifteen?
- Is there a cheaper or free tool already in our stack that would solve the same problem?
The honest answer for most small businesses is that you want Copilot on two to four seats first, used by the people who write or analyse a lot, and rolled out wider once the patterns are clear. Buying seats across the whole team to chase a promotional rate usually means most of those seats go unused, which is the same problem we see with disconnected software stacks.
If you want a view on whether Copilot is the right next step or whether there is a cheaper fix sitting inside what you already pay for, the free audit at digilyse.co gives you a clear answer in about ten minutes.
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