Two stories worth paying attention to this week. One quiet, one practical.

The quiet one: 20 million and counting

Microsoft confirmed that paid Copilot users have crossed 20 million, up from 15 million in January. Weekly Copilot usage inside Microsoft 365 is now on a par with Outlook itself.

That is the line worth pausing on. It means a meaningful chunk of UK office workers are now reaching for AI as often as they reach for email, whether their employer has a strategy for it or not.

If you have Microsoft 365 in your business, your team is in that 20 million somewhere. The question is whether they are using it on real work or whether they tried it once, did not get much back and quietly stopped.

The training gap

Worth remembering that we have spent decades learning how to use email. We know when to reply, when to bcc, what a polite tone looks like and what a passive-aggressive one looks like.

Copilot is a new category of tool with new behaviours, and almost nobody has been taught any of them. That is the gap between paying for Copilot and getting value from it. It is not the licence. It is the training.

The businesses getting real value from Copilot are not the ones that rolled it out to everyone and hoped for the best. They are the ones that picked 5–10 high-value tasks, trained people on those specific tasks, and measured what changed.

The practical one: price increase coming

Microsoft’s price increase on Microsoft 365 hits on 1 July 2026. Most plans go up 5 to 15 percent, with frontline worker plans increasing up to 33 percent.

Existing customers can lock in current pricing by renewing before then, which in practice means kicking off the conversation with your IT provider by mid-June.

What to do before 1 July

  1. Review your licence allocation. How many seats do you have? How many are actively used? Cancel unused seats before renewal.
  2. Check your plan tier. Are you on a plan that matches your actual usage, or are you paying for features nobody uses?
  3. Talk to your IT provider by mid-June. Renewing before the price increase locks in the current rate for another year.
  4. Consider Copilot allocation. If you are paying for Copilot licences across the business, check who is actually using them. Training a smaller group properly often delivers more value than giving everyone access.

The price increase is a good prompt to audit your Microsoft 365 spend. Most businesses are paying for more than they use.