Microsoft Ditches Free AI Consumption on GitHub Copilot Harness
Microsoft has announced changes to its AI consumption strategy with the release of GitHub Copilot harness for Copilot Studio, which enables an agentic reasoning loop. As part of this release, Microsoft will start charging for consumption on the GitHub Copilot harness specifically from September 1. This move is significant as it follows Satya Nadella's statement in July that the company is evolving its business model to shift away from per-seat licenses and towards a consumption-based model.
Interestingly, 90% of Fortune 500 organizations have given developers the freedom to explore their curiosity and consume this technology. Microsoft will be charging for consumption on the GitHub Copilot harness, but there's a catch - if you use the standard harness in Copilot Studio, there's free allocation for developers to go play with this.
To put this into perspective, Salesforce provides 200,000 Flex Credits for its users to explore Agentforce. Microsoft's move is expected to be a growing pain for vendors as consumption starts to become the new metric. The company may not be able to sustain this model where there's high demand, given that it took them seven weeks to realize that there was a problem with this approach when GitHub Copilot tried it before.