Product guide · checked September 2026
The AI already sitting in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace
Your firm almost certainly runs one of these two. It's hard to work out what the AI in it actually does, which parts are free, and which parts are the expensive thing you said no to.
🔑 The easy mistake, in both suites: thinking the AI is the paid add-on you declined. A useful chunk of it is already included in what you pay today, switched on, and unused.
Read on Microsoft's and Google's own pages in September 2026. Both vendors repackaged and renamed their AI during 2025 and 2026, so anything you read older than that is wrong. Where a price isn't published, we say so.
Microsoft 365: what's free is called Copilot Chat
Microsoft Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost with Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, the Enterprise plans and the Teams plans. If you pay Microsoft anything for email, you almost certainly have it.
⚠️ The names changed recently, which makes it hard to know what you have. "Microsoft 365 Copilot" is now "Microsoft Copilot," and "Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat" is now "Microsoft Copilot Chat." Two products, one word apart.
What the free one does: it's chat grounded in the web. Microsoft's own wording is that it's not grounded in organizational content like files, emails, or chats. It is grounded in data from the web only. There's one exception in Microsoft's own documentation: inside Outlook it can also read your own mail, calendar, meetings and some OneDrive and SharePoint files. You can still paste or upload a document and work on it, and it sits in a side panel in Outlook and Teams next to whatever you have open.
What the paid one adds: chat that searches your own files, emails, meetings and chats; Copilot built inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams with in-app editing; priority access to better models; agents; usage reporting.
➡️ The free version may do most of what you imagined buying. Drafting, rewriting, summarizing something you paste in. It won't search across all your files the way the paid version does. Understand that line before you spend anything.
Microsoft prices, per user per month, paid yearly
| Plan | Yearly | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Business Basic | $7.00 | not verified |
| Business Standard | $14.00 | $16.80 |
| Business Premium | $22.00 | $26.40 |
| Business Standard with Copilot | $23.50 | $28.20 |
| Business Premium with Copilot | $32.00 | $38.40 |
| Enterprise E3 / E5 / E7 | $39 / $60 / $99 | not published |
The Copilot add-on on its own is Microsoft 365 Copilot Business at $18.00 per user per month paid yearly, reduced from $21.00 on a promotion running to December 31, 2026, or $25.20 billed monthly. The promotional price applies to the first year only. On the Enterprise plans it's $30.00 yearly. No minimum seat count is published, so nothing on any page we read stops a ten-person firm from buying three seats.
🔴 Check this before you buy, because Microsoft doesn't explain it. Business Standard at $14 plus the $18 add-on comes to $32. But "Business Standard with Copilot" is $23.50. Two routes to what looks like the same place, $8.50 per user per month apart at the $18 promotion. For a ten-person firm that's $1,020 a year. At the normal $21 price the gap is $11.50, or $1,380 a year. Ask which one you're being sold.
Before you upgrade for Copilot
🔴 The advertised $18 price requires an annual commitment. Once the free trial turns into a paid plan, you're paying for the rest of the year, across every seat you bought.
The paid tier is a genuinely different product from the free one. Whether it's better for your firm depends almost entirely on whether your own files are organized well enough for it to find anything useful in them.
So do this in order.
- Use the free Copilot Chat for two weeks first. You already own it. It costs nothing and it tells you whether anyone in the office will actually change how they work. If nobody opens the free one, nobody will open the paid one.
- Then start Microsoft's free one-month trial of the paid tier, and put the end date in your calendar, because it turns into a paid subscription unless you cancel.
- Buy the smallest number of paid seats you can, for the people most likely to use them. No minimum seat count is published, so you don't have to license everyone.
- Before the term starts, write down what would make it worth keeping. Two or three specific things, in your own words. It's much harder to talk yourself into a renewal against a list you wrote while you were still unconvinced.
- Ask, in writing, what happens if you cancel mid-term, and whether the "with Copilot" bundle and the separate add-on carry the same commitment. They're sold as different products, and we couldn't find that answer published.
The free tier is worth switching on today. The paid tier is worth testing before you commit. Don't buy a seat for everybody on an annual term before you know whether anyone wants it.
What to actually test, and why these two things
🔑 Has anyone in your firm already used a general chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude? If yes, take their expectations seriously. They'll be comparing Copilot against a tool that almost never says no.
The free Copilot Chat is chat, and it behaves the way you'd expect chat to behave. The paid tier's headline feature is different: it acts inside Word, Excel and Outlook, on your actual documents. That's a harder job than answering a question, and it's where the gap between what you asked for and what happened tends to show up.
So test these two things in the first week, before the term runs.
- 1. Does it decline things it ought to be able to do? Give it a handful of ordinary requests a person in your office would make. Count how many come back as some version of "I can't do that." A tool that refuses is worse than no tool, because somebody still had to stop and ask.
- 2. When it says it did something, did it actually do it? This is the easy one to miss. Ask it to change a document, then open the document and check. Reporting success and producing a change are two different events, and if they come apart you have to verify everything, which costs more time than it saved.
If both of those come back clean for your people on your documents, the paid tier is probably worth the year. If either one fails repeatedly in week one, it won't improve by month six, and you'll have signed up for eleven more.
Whether AI inside your office suite is worth paying for comes down to whether it does what you asked on the documents you have. That answer is different in every firm, so give it ten minutes of testing before you decide from a brochure.
Google Workspace: Gemini is already in your plan
Business Starter $7, Business Standard $14, Business Plus $22 per user per month with a one-year commitment, or $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40 month to month. Enterprise is contact-sales and the price isn't published.
🔑 There's no separate Gemini subscription anymore. It's folded into all three business editions. Starter includes Gemini in Gmail only: the side panel, Help me write and Proofread. Standard and Plus add Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive and Meet: the side panel and Help me write and document summaries in Docs, the AI function and enhanced smart fill in Sheets, slide and image generation in Slides, and PDF analysis in Drive.
Business Standard and Plus also add the two that matter most for a client-facing firm: "Help me schedule" in Gmail, and "Take notes for me" in Meet.
⚠️ Meet recording and transcription are Business Standard and Plus only, not Starter. If you're on Starter and wondering why your meetings don't write themselves up, that's why, and the fix is a plan change rather than a purchase.
NotebookLM is now called Gemini Notebook and is included, at standard access on Starter and higher access on Standard and Plus. Load a set of documents and ask questions of only those documents. It's the most useful thing in the suite, and the easiest to overlook.
There's one paid add-on, AI Expanded Access, whose price Google doesn't publish.
The part a regulated firm actually needs
Both vendors publish a position on training. We're quoting them, not assessing them.
- Microsoft: "Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs." Prompts and answers are stored as user activity history, are searchable by administrators, can be put under retention policies, and users can delete their own history. Data residency commitments have covered Copilot since March 2024.
- ⚠️ Microsoft names OpenAI and Anthropic as subprocessors, and states that Anthropic models are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary. If where data is processed matters to you, that's the sentence to take to your compliance consultant.
- Google: "Workspace does not use customer data for training models without customer's prior permission or instruction", and content isn't human reviewed or used for model training outside your domain without permission. Retention for Gemini in Workspace is 90 days to indefinite depending on admin settings; the Gemini app is up to 36 months.
- 🔴 Read this Google caveat carefully: "Your organization's file sharing and data region settings do not apply to data in Gemini Notebook." The most useful tool in the suite is the one your existing controls don't reach.
The switch that decides whether anyone has any of this
Both suites have an organization-wide control, and in a small firm it's easy to forget where it's set. Check yours before concluding you don't have AI.
- Microsoft: admin center → Copilot → Settings, and Integrated Apps → Copilot, where you choose all users or specific users. ⚠️ That control is tenant-wide and, used bluntly, blocks Copilot even for someone holding a paid seat.
- Google: admin console → Menu → Generative AI → Gemini app → Service status → on or off for everyone, and it can be scoped to one department. Changes take up to 24 hours. ⚠️ Google has two switches, not one. Google says the Gemini app setting "has no effect on other AI features in Google Workspace services." Gemini in Gmail, Docs and the other apps has its own setting, so check both.
What we'd check first, in order
- Open the billing screen and write down the plan name. Everything on this page depends on it.
- Check the org-wide AI switch. It costs nothing to check, and it may be why you think you don't have any AI.
- On Microsoft: try Copilot Chat before pricing anything. You already own it. Use it for two weeks, see what it does and doesn't do, then decide.
- On Google Standard or Plus: turn on "Take notes for me" in Meet. Client calls write themselves up and it costs nothing extra.
- Then, and only then, price the paid tier against what the free one couldn't do. That list may be shorter than you expect.
Want this done properly across everything you run?
The audit covers your office suite, your case or client system, and everything between them. A few sessions of your time, then a written report naming what to switch on, what to buy, and what to leave alone.
Prices move and vendors reprice without announcing it. Everything here carries the date it was checked. If you get a quote that differs, tell us and we'll update the page.