Understanding Microsoft 365 E7 Licensing

Key Takeaways

• Microsoft 365 E7 is to be generally available from 1 May 2026 at $99 per user per month. It bundles Microsoft 365 (M365) E5 ($60 from July 2026), Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30), Entra Suite ($12), and Agent 365 ($15). Buying these separately would cost $117, so E7 saves roughly 15%.

• Agent 365 is a governance and security layer for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, not a tool for building or running them. It gives information technology (IT) administrators visibility and control over agents through Entra, Purview, and Defender. It does not create agents or provide compute for them.

• $99 per seat is not the full cost of an "agentic enterprise." Building and running AI agents requires separate consumption spending through Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, or both. Microsoft's own partner blog confirms that E7 and Agent Factory are needed "together", meaning two separate purchases.

• As of 9 March 2026, Microsoft has not published expected consumption costs per agent, total cost of ownership guidance, or reference architectures. Organisations cannot currently budget for the variable portion of the cost.

• We expect significant discounting. Microsoft has been running 15% and 20% and even 30% promotional discounts on Copilot throughout 2025 and 2026 without meaningfully moving adoption numbers. A $99 list price leaves substantial room for incentive programmes, and we expect Microsoft to use it.

On 9 March 2026, Microsoft officially announced Microsoft 365 E7, branded "The Frontier Suite," a name that does more marketing than describing (earlier leaked partner material, which we cannot disclose, used the working title "The Frontier Worker Suite"). It is the first new enterprise edition in the Microsoft 365 lineup since E5 launched in 2015. Priced at $99 per user per month, E7 bundles Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Entra Suite, and the newly confirmed Agent 365 into a single subscription. General availability is set for 1 May 2026.

The Big Announcement

Microsoft unveiled E7 on 9 March 2026 through a coordinated set of blog posts from four senior executives, each presenting a different facet of the same offering.

Judson Althoff confirmed the headline: E7 at $99 per user per month, generally available from 1 May 2026, alongside Agent 365 at $15 per user per month on the same date. In Microsoft's framing, E7 "unifies Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Agent 365 into a single solution" and "includes Microsoft Entra Suite and advanced Defender, Intune and Purview security capabilities," though as the rest of this article shows, "single solution" omits the separate consumption costs that sit outside the $99 price.

Jared Spataro detailed the Copilot and agent capabilities, including the third wave of M365 Copilot features. Vasu Jakkal covered Agent 365's security architecture in detail, noting that Microsoft Security capabilities now protect 1.6 million customers (a figure Jakkal attributes to fiscal year 2026 (FY26) Q2 earnings). And Nicole Dezen (Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President (CVP), Global Channel Partner Sales) addressed the partner channel, describing E7 as "the productivity suite for a human-led, agent-operated enterprise," a phrase worth noting because no established market for "agent-operated enterprises" yet exists outside Microsoft's own framing.

The story had been circulating for nearly two weeks before the official announcement. Business Insider broke it on 27 February, citing two anonymous sources. Several independent analysts published their own analysis in the interim. Directions on Microsoft, widely regarded as the gold standard for Microsoft strategy analysis (although we would like to contest their crown), published two articles in early March exploring the implications. Jukka Niiranen at The Licensing Guide (updated 7 March 2026) analysed Agent 365's positioning relative to Microsoft 365. Microsoft's response on 3 March, when asked directly, was that it "does not have anything to share at this time."

Before the official announcement, we flagged two things. First, that $99-per-user-per-month price point was not aggressive enough. We predicted something closer to $85 would be needed to drive adoption. We still hold that view on the list price. Second, the critical question was not the headline price but whether E7 would introduce a hybrid model, combining per-seat licensing with consumption-based costs.

The $9 premium over E5 + Copilot buys $27 worth of standalone products (Entra Suite + Agent 365). The bundle maths works, but only if you need all four components.

We initially expected the $9 premium over E5 plus Copilot ($90 from July 2026) to be difficult to justify. Having seen the detailed contents, the premium buys $27 worth of standalone products, Entra Suite at $12 and Agent 365 at $15. The bundle arithmetic is more favourable than we anticipated. However, the list price remains, in our view, too high for broad enterprise adoption at scale, and we expect Microsoft to discount accordingly.

What Is in Microsoft 365 E7?

E7 bundles four distinct product families into a single per-user subscription. Each of these is available separately today, or will be from 1 May 2026 in the case of Agent 365.

As Althoff frames it, "At $99 per user, E7 is priced below purchasing these capabilities à la carte."

Microsoft's official graphic shows three pillars: M365 E5 plus Entra Suite providing "secure productive work," Microsoft 365 Copilot as "AI built for work," and Agent 365 as the "control plane for agents." A shared foundation layer called Work IQ underpins all three, "built with trust to protect the organization." E7 is "available with and without Teams", reflecting the European Union (EU) unbundling requirements that have been in effect since 2023. Note: $99 is probably the "full" price, with Teams.

The E5 portion of E7 is not today's E5. From 1 July 2026, Microsoft is folding several current add-ons into E5 alongside the price increase from $57 to $60 (+5.3%). These include Intune Plan 2 with Remote Help and Advanced Analytics, Intune Endpoint Privilege Management, Enterprise App Management, Cloud PKI, and Security Copilot. Some of these, such as Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, are being added to E3 as well.

The Security Copilot inclusion deserves a closer look, because it is not a straightforward "consumption product becomes fixed-price." E5 customers get access to the full Security Copilot product, including all chat, promptbook, and agentic scenarios across Defender, Entra, Intune, Purview, and the standalone portal, plus developer tools like Agent Builder and APIs. The catch is the capacity cap. Microsoft allocates 400 Security Compute Units (SCUs) per month per 1,000 licensed users, scaling linearly up to a hard cap of 10,000 SCUs per month (reached at 25,000 users).

SCUs reset monthly with no rollover. Exceed the allocation, and overage costs $6 per SCU on a pay-as-you-go basis, which is 50% more than the provisioned capacity rate of $4 per SCU per hour. The standalone consumption product remains avaliable for customers without E5. As we have noted previously, 400 SCUs per 1,000 users may not survive the first week in an active security operations centre (SOC), and the monthly reset without rollover punishes the spiky workloads that are characteristic of security operations. Do not count Security Copilot in E5 as "free." Count the allocation, model realistic usage, and budget for overage.

Security Copilot in E5 allocates 400 SCUs per 1,000 users per month. Overage costs $6 per SCU — 50% above the provisioned rate. Do not count it as "free."

The pattern here, full capabilities with a metered allocation and expensive overage, previews the hybrid cost model that E7 extends to AI agents through Agent 365 and Agent Factory. Microsoft is not moving away from consumption billing; it is layering consumption caps into per-seat subscriptions.

Copilot Wave 3 and what it means for the E7 value question

Copilot's $30 per user per month list price has not changed since its launch in 2023, but the product itself has been evolving. The 9 March announcement coincides with what Microsoft calls the third wave of M365 Copilot, so it is worth looking at what has actually changed, and whether the $30 Copilot component within E7 carries more weight than it did a year ago.

Microsoft describes Copilot Wave 3 as a shift from single-task assistance toward multi-step workflow execution inside applications. The list price remains $30 per user per month.

Jared Spataro's blog describes Wave 3 as the evolution from single-task assistance to multi-step workflow execution within applications. What Microsoft initially called "Agent Mode" during preview has been absorbed into the standard Copilot experience: "As we moved toward general availability, it became clear that this isn't a separate mode at all." Agentic capabilities are generally available in Excel and Word, with PowerPoint and Outlook rolling out over the coming months. Whether these agentic features deliver enough productivity gain to justify Copilot's $30 price tag is the question that 96.7% of the M365 installed base (based on Directions on Microsoft's penetration calculation) has yet to answer affirmatively, Wave 3 makes Copilot more capable, but it does not make it cheaper: the price is still $30 per user per month, the ROI case still rests on measurable productivity gains, and organisations that have not found those gains at $30 standalone might not find them more convincing inside a $99 bundle.

The other new feature is the multi-model strategy. Microsoft describes Copilot as "model diverse by design", where "Copilot automatically applies the right model for the task." Claude from Anthropic is now available in mainline Copilot Chat via the Frontier programme, alongside the latest OpenAI models. Copilot Cowork, detailed in a fifth companion blog by Charles Lamanna (President, Business Applications & Agents), allows users to delegate long-running, multi-step work rather than following the prompt-response pattern of earlier versions. As Lamanna describes it: "Working closely with Anthropic, we have integrated the technology behind Claude Cowork into Microsoft 365 Copilot." Cowork is in research preview now, with broader availability through the Frontier programme expected in late March 2026.

Copilot also gains support for open standards. Model Context Protocol (MCP) Apps allow third-party applications to surface directly within Copilot Chat. Launch partners include Adobe, Monday.com, and Figma, alongside Microsoft's own Dynamics 365 and Power Apps, though "partners at launch" is a marketing designation that says nothing about integration depth or production readiness. Agent Builder, a simplified tool for end users, sits alongside Copilot Studio for IT and business leaders who need more control. Notably for AI professionals, the MCP support is framed entirely as a curated partner ecosystem ("Apps SDK and MCP Apps"), not as an open protocol endpoint that organisations can plug their own tools into.

None of these capabilities is exclusive to E7. Any organisation with a standalone M365 Copilot licence at $30 per user per month gets the same Wave 3 features. The practical question for E7 evaluation is narrower. If you have already decided Copilot is worth $30, does the Wave 3 upgrade make the $99 bundle more palatable? Perhaps. But if your organisation has not yet found sufficient value in Copilot at $30, does bundling a more capable version into a $99 suite resolve that problem? That is yet to be seen.

Entra Suite breakdown

Entra Suite has been generally available since July 2024. It is an add-on to Entra ID P1, which is already included in E5. The suite bundles three capabilities that would cost $17 separately.

Source: Microsoft Entra pricing.

A note on pricing: the $12 price is for the add-on when Entra Suite is added to Entra ID P1 (which is what E5 includes).

Agent 365 is The Control Plane, Not the Engine

Agent 365 is the component of E7 whose name is most misleading. It maysuggests something to do with building or running AI agents. It does not.

Agent 365 has had an uncertain path to market. It was announced at Ignite in November 2025, then withdrawn from public-facing materials. It spent the following months in preview under the "Frontier" test programme, described by analysts not as a standalone service but as "a set of features spanning Entra, Purview, and Defender XDR." The 9 March announcement confirms it as a generally available (GA) product at $15 per user per month from 1 May 2026.

Agent 365 is a governance and security layer. Jared Spataro calls it "one place to observe, secure, and govern every agent across the organisation." It extends existing Microsoft security products, specifically Entra, Purview, and Defender, to cover AI agents in addition to human users.

Jukka Niiranen captured the distinction most concisely: "Copilot is about what AI can do; Agent 365 is about controlling what AI is allowed to do."

Once agents start acting on behalf of users, the usual identity and compliance controls stop working. You cannot apply Conditional Access to a non-human identity, you have limited visibility into what data an agent touches, and there is no built-in audit trail for autonomous actions. Agent 365 is Microsoft's answer to that problem, even if its readiness to close these gaps is debatable.

A KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey (September 2025, 130 US C-suite leaders at organisations with $1B+ revenue), cited by Microsoft on the Entra Agent ID product page (the primary KPMG report is not publicly available), found that 42% of large organisations have already deployed agents, 76% of leaders expect employees to manage agents within two to three years, 55% of the workforce accepts or actively embraces AI agents, and 78% are concerned about cybersecurity for agents. Agent governance is already on the agenda for most large organisations. Whether it needs to be a $15 per user per month product, or whether it should have been folded into the security capabilities already included in E5, is a separate conversation.

What Agent 365 provides

According to Vasu Jakkal's security blog, Agent 365 delivers three capability pillars.

Observability comes through the Agent Registry, which provides an inventory of all agents across the organisation, an agent map, behaviour and performance reports with role-specific oversight, risk signals surfaced through Defender, Entra, and Purview, and security policy templates starting with Entra.

Identity and governance extends Entra to agents through Entra Agent ID (currently in public preview, included in Agent 365), which gives each agent a unique identity in the directory. Agents then fall under Identity Protection and Conditional Access policies, just as human users do. Identity Governance provides scoped access packages for agents.

Compliance and security extends Purview and Defender to cover agent activity. On the Purview side, it includes Data Security Posture Management, Information Protection (agents inherit sensitivity labels), inline Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Copilot Studio agent prompts, Insider Risk Management, Data Lifecycle Management, Audit/eDiscovery for agent activity, and Communication Compliance for agent interactions. On the Defender side, purpose-built detection covers prompt manipulation, model tampering, and agent-based attack chains.

Some of these capabilities are not yet production-ready. Jakkal's blog notes that security posture management for Foundry and Copilot Studio agents, along with detection and response, will continue in public preview on 1 May. Runtime threat protection via the "Agent 365 tools gateway" is entering public preview in April 2026, meaning it will not be generally available at launch.

Not every agent needs Agent 365

It would be easy to assume that every AI agent in an organisation will require an Agent 365 licence. Only business-critical agents, those shared broadly within the organisation, handling sensitive or regulated information, or performing autonomous actions, need Agent 365 governance. Casual agents built by individual users in Copilot Chat or Teams do not.

Microsoft has done this before. When it launched Managed Environments for Power Platform, it created a licensing boundary between simple apps that anyone could build and governed apps that required Power Apps Premium licensing. Agent 365 follows the same path: simple agents are free within limits, governed agents need the premium licence.

Microsoft supports agents built with Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, the M365 Agents Toolkit, Agent Framework, and the Agent 365 software development kit (SDK). The governance extends to third-party and open-source agent frameworks as well, though the practical scope of that coverage at launch remains to be seen.

Agent 365 does not require E7

Agent 365 is available as a standalone product at $15 per user per month. Organisations that need agent governance but not the full E7 bundle can buy it separately.

The Hybrid Cost Model: What $99 Does Not Cover

Before the official announcement, the open question was whether E7 would be purely per-seat or introduce a hybrid model. We flagged consumption-based costs as the overlooked detail in Agent 365 licensing and explored the broader Microsoft AI platform cost structure that makes a flat per-seat price unlikely for agent workloads.

The 9 March announcements confirmed the hybrid model. E7 at $99 per user per month covers the per-seat layer. Agent building and execution sit on a separate consumption layer, and Security Copilot overages add another consumption dimension on top. The consumer-facing announcements do not emphasise the separation, but the partner blog makes it explicit.

Layer 1: per-seat ($99/user/month)

E7 covers enterprise productivity through E5, identity and access control through Entra Suite, AI assistance through Copilot, and agent governance through Agent 365. Agent 365 is explicitly a control plane. It lets you observe, secure, and govern agents. It does not build them. It does not run them.

Layer 2: consumption (separate from E7)

To build and run agents beyond the thin free tier included with Copilot, organisations need Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, or both. These carry their own costs.

Credits in capacity packs expire monthly. Annual P3 credits expire annually, which is better for planning but still use-it-or-lose-it. Neither rolls over. Unused credits are forfeit.

Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan tiers

Source: TechCommunity. Pricing as of October 2025, subject to change.

Agent Pre-Purchase Plan tiers

Source: TechCommunity. Pricing as of November 2025, subject to change. 1 Agent Consumption Unit (ACU) is consumed per $1 of retail cost across Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry usage.

Two control planes, two bills

The same agent can sit under two separate control planes, billed under different models. Agent 365 (per-seat, included in E7) handles the IT administration side: identity, governance, compliance, and security through the Microsoft Admin Centre. Azure AI Foundry (consumption-based, under an Azure subscription) handles the developer side: building, testing, deploying, and running agents. Both can apply to the same agent simultaneously. An organisation deploying agents at scale would see Agent 365 costs on their M365 invoice and Foundry execution costs on their Azure invoice, managed by different teams, under different budget lines, with different cost dynamics.

Nicole Dezen's partner blog says it directly: "Together, Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent Factory provide a clear path." Note the word "together". E7 and Agent Factory are two separate purchases. Agent Factory "enables customers to build, deploy, and scale custom agents with comprehensive tooling", and its Pre-Purchase Plan (P3) "adds licensing flexibility across Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Fabric, and GitHub."

E7 at $99/user/month covers governance only. Building and running agents requires separate consumption spending through Copilot Studio, Foundry, or both — with no published TCO guidance from Microsoft.

$99 per user per month is not the complete cost of an agentic enterprise. It is the governance floor. Actual running costs depend on how many agents you build, how heavily they execute, and which combination of Copilot Studio and Foundry you use. We have covered the broader cost structure of Microsoft's AI platform and the licensing shift towards agent-based models in separate articles. As far as we are aware, Microsoft has published no reference architectures, no expected costs per agent, and no total cost of ownership guidance.

The thin free tier

Microsoft 365 Copilot, included in E7 at $30, provides a limited zero-cost agent capability. "Copilot Studio lite for internal agents" allows zero-rated agent usage within Copilot Chat, Teams, and SharePoint. Anything beyond those boundaries costs credits.

Nobody yet knows how restrictive that free tier will be. Microsoft has done this before with Power Apps, where the seeded app access rights included with Dynamics 365 and Office 365 are limited to specific pre-built apps and cannot be used for custom development. If the Copilot Studio lite tier follows the same pattern, plan for consumption costs from the start.

What the hybrid model means for budgeting

This is not new for Microsoft. Power BI Pro is per-seat while Fabric is metered. Purview in E5 is per-seat, but extended scanning is consumption-based. Agent 365 in E7 works the same way: per-seat for governance, consumption-based for execution through Copilot Studio and Foundry.

For organisations planning an E7 deployment, the budget should account for three components:

1. $99 per user per month multiplied by seat count (predictable, per-seat)

2. Agent building and execution consumption (variable, depends on agent volume and complexity)

3. Potentially an Agent Factory P3 annual commitment for volume discounts versus pay-as-you-go rates

The first is known. The second and third are not, and Microsoft has given no guidance to help estimate them.

Bundle Economics: Is E7 Worth It?

All scenarios use July 2026 prices where applicable.

E7 only saves money if you need all four components.

Historical context

E7 is the first new Microsoft 365 enterprise edition since E5 launched in 2015. Microsoft held E5 at $57 from the March 2022 price increase through June 2026, deliberately keeping it flat while E3 rose to $36. The narrowing gap made E5 the obviously better value. E7 is designed to do the same thing for the Copilot and agent era, making standalone Copilot at $30 look less attractive by comparison.

The discounting question

Our view is that $99 per user per month at list price is too high for broad adoption, and Microsoft's own Copilot discounting history points to the same conclusion.

Throughout 2025 and into 2026, Microsoft has run escalating promotional discounts on Copilot without materially moving adoption numbers. These have included 15% and 20% ongoing promotions, a 30% discount for deployments of 300 or more seats with 80% information worker coverage, 50% off E5 Compliance when purchased with Copilot (extended to 30 June 2026), a promo cap increase from 2,400 to 9,999 licences in February 2026, and month-to-month billing for Copilot Business from March 2026, removing the annual commitment barrier entirely.

Dezen's partner blog references "promotional offers aligned to Microsoft 365 E7" designed to accelerate adoption, with CSP incentives for E7 and Agent 365 starting 1 April 2026 (E7 and Agent 365 eligible as workloads for core, strategic product accelerator, and growth levers). As of 9 March, Partner Center March 2026 announcements contained no E7 or Agent 365 promotional details. The specifics have not been published yet. We expect them to be substantial.

Why E7 Exists Now

Microsoft 365 Copilot, launched at $30 per user per month, has not been a commercial blockbuster.

As of Microsoft's Q2 FY26 earnings in January 2026 (we covered the licensing implications at the time), Copilot had approximately 15 million paid seats against roughly 450 million M365 business subscribers. That is just over 3% penetration, and the discounting campaigns have not changed the picture significantly.

Microsoft's own messaging in the Althoff blog frames the numbers differently, stating that Copilot paid seats are "growing more than 160% year over year," that daily active usage is "up ten times," that "90 percent of the Fortune 500" now use Copilot, and that the number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale (more than 35,000 seats) has "tripled year over year." Althoff also names Mercedes Benz (a global rollout "just last week"), NASA, Fiserv, ING, University of Kentucky, University of Manchester, the US Department of the Interior, and Westpac as reference customers. These claims are not independently verified, and percentage growth from a small base can coexist comfortably with low absolute penetration.

Microsoft as its own reference customer

Althoff positions Microsoft as "Customer Zero" for Agent 365, claiming visibility into more than 500,000 agents internally, "80 percent of the Fortune 500 already using Microsoft agents", and "tens of millions of agents" registered in the Agent 365 preview across "tens of thousands of customers" in two months. None of these figures are independently verified, and a Copilot Studio declarative agent with a single prompt counts the same as a governed production deployment. How many of those tens of millions actually need paid governance is a question Microsoft does not address.

The bundling pattern

Bundling is Microsoft's standard response when standalone adoption stalls. E5 absorbed Teams Phone and Power BI Pro after neither reached the penetration Microsoft wanted as add-ons. E7 follows the same logic for Copilot and Agent 365.

Althoff frames it as customer demand: "Customers have told us E5 alone is no longer enough; they do not want multiple tools stitched together, they want one trusted solution." One might reasonably ask which customers were clamouring for a $99 per user subscription when 96.7% of the M365 installed base has not yet bought Copilot at $30.

The longer-term play is more interesting. Just as every human employee has historically needed a Microsoft 365 licence, Microsoft is building the commercial framework for every AI agent to need one too. We have explored this shift in Microsoft's licensing model in detail. E7 is where that model starts.

The Frontier branding

With E7, Microsoft's M365 range now runs from "Frontline" to "Frontier":

Prices from Microsoft 365 enterprise pricing, Microsoft 365 frontline pricing, and the July 2026 price increase announcement.

That is a 33-to-1 price ratio from the cheapest to the most expensive Microsoft 365 subscription.

Microsoft's "Frontier" early access programme, referenced across all the announcement blogs, serves as the preview mechanism for E7's AI capabilities, including Claude in Copilot Chat and Copilot Cowork (built in collaboration with Anthropic). The Entra Agent ID product page describes it as "the Microsoft early access program for the latest AI innovations." Agent 365 early access is available through Frontier.

As of 9 March 2026, no public signup page for the Frontier programme has been found. Both microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/frontier-program and microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/copilot/frontier return 404. The Agent 365 product page is live but offers only "Contact Sales" with no self-serve purchase option. The E7 product page at microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/e7 does not yet exist. For a product with a 1 May generally available (GA) date, the absence of a public-facing onboarding path is conspicuous.

What We Still Don't Know

The 9 March announcement resolved several open questions but left others unanswered.

🔹 Channel availability. Dezen's blog mentions CSP incentives but says nothing about Enterprise Agreement (EA), Microsoft Customer Agreement for Enterprise (MCA-E), or other commercial channels. For organisations that purchase through EA, it is not yet clear whether E7 will be available at renewal or only through newer agreement types.

🔹 Education, government, and nonprofit pricing. Microsoft typically offers discounted variants for these sectors, but no E7 variants have been announced.

🔹 Minimum seat counts. Whether E7 will require a minimum deployment size, as some Copilot promotions do, is unknown.

🔹 Transition paths. For organisations currently on E5 plus standalone Copilot, the mechanics of migrating to E7 mid-term have not been described. Whether existing Copilot licences can be credited or rolled in, or must simply expire before switching, is an open question.

🔹 Preview capabilities at launch. Several Agent 365 security features will remain in public preview on 1 May. Runtime threat protection is entering preview in April 2026. Organisations buying Agent 365 at GA should understand that some advertised capabilities are not production-ready.

🔹 Consumption cost guidance. Microsoft has published no expected costs per agent, no reference architectures, and no total cost of ownership models for the consumption layer. Organisations cannot meaningfully budget for agent building and execution costs today.

🔹 The thin free tier in practice. How much agent capability the Copilot Studio lite tier actually provides, and how quickly organisations will hit its boundaries, is unknown.

🔹 Product Terms. As of 9 March 2026, no E7 stock-keeping unit (SKU) appears in the Microsoft Product Terms. Until it does, the formal licensing terms, use rights, and restrictions that govern E7 in enterprise agreements are unknown.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Microsoft 365 E7 the same as E5 with Copilot? No. E7 includes E5 and Copilot but adds two further components: Entra Suite ($12 standalone) and Agent 365 ($15 standalone).

Do I need E7 to use Agent 365? No. Agent 365 is available as a standalone product at $15 per user per month from 1 May 2026.

Does E7 include the cost of building and running AI agents? No. E7 covers governance, security, and observability for agents through Agent 365. Building and running agents requires separate consumption spending through Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, or both.

Is E7 available without Teams? Yes. Like other Microsoft 365 enterprise editions, E7 is available with or without Teams, reflecting EU unbundling requirements.

When is E7 generally available? 1 May 2026. Promotional offers aligned to E7 are expected from 1 April 2026.

Which purchasing channels support E7? As of 9 March 2026, only CSP incentives have been confirmed. Availability through Enterprise Agreement (EA), MCA-E, and other channels has not been announced.

If E7, its consumption costs, or the July 2026 price changes raise questions for your organisation, get in touch. We are independent Microsoft licensing advisors. We do not sell Microsoft licences or cloud services, and we have no incentive to steer you towards a particular product.