- From 1 December 2026, new Copilot Business licences bought through CSP default to usage-based billing, with a default limit of 4,000 credits per user per month.
- Odoo 20 states that all AI features now consume credits, and agentic AI sits on the Custom plan: the credit price is published nowhere.
- The most reducible cost is not the vendor's rate but your preamble: system prompt and tool schemas, resent at every step.
The per-seat fee is no longer the rule
For two years, AI was bought like a licence option: an amount per user per month, predictable, budgeted once. Between September and October 2026, three vendors announced changes that replace that flat fee with metered consumption. The effective dates fall in the coming weeks.
This shift is not a disguised price rise, and it may even reduce the bill of a company whose usage stays low. The problem lies elsewhere: a variable spend with no known ceiling does not fit an annual budget, and several of these changes apply by default, with no action from the buyer.
Microsoft: a default cap few buyers know about
Partner Center's October 2026 announcements state that from 1 December 2026, usage-based billing is enabled by default for new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences bought through a CSP partner, with a default spending limit of 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, adjustable by an administrator. Microsoft's worked example covers 100 users, up to 400,000 credits a month.
Two further points on the same page are worth noting. On that date, Copilot and Copilot Business can be bought without a qualifying Microsoft 365 base subscription, at the same price, and the current add-on offers reach end of sale in CSP. In other words, a company renewing or extending licences after 1 December is no longer buying quite the same product.
Odoo: the heaviest change for Moroccan SMEs
The Odoo 20 release notes state that all AI features now need credits, bought through In-App Purchase. The same release introduces agents that create and update records, run inside automated or scheduled actions and connect to the database over MCP. On the pricing page, “Odoo Studio / Agentic AI” sits on the Custom plan, at 16.40 US dollars per user per month billed yearly, and In-App Purchase credits are included in no plan.
This is the most structural change in the series for Moroccan businesses, where Odoo is widely deployed. What is missing should be said plainly: the credit price is published on no reachable page. The real cost of an Odoo agent cannot be computed from official sources. Before signing, ask for that rate in writing and have a typical month quoted.
Salesforce and SAP: the guardrails arrive before the prices
On 27 October 2026, Salesforce made Agent Fabric generally available: a FinOps dashboard, a model wallet, cost optimisation policies and an agent kill switch. The announcement claims savings of “up to 75%”, explicitly measured on test scenarios rather than with customers. Agent evaluation tools enter beta in November 2026, with general availability in January 2027.
The same day, SAP presented an enterprise AI gateway with authentication, policies and usage tracking, plus custom agents free on its managed runtime through December 2026 for selected customers, a scope not defined publicly. A dominant vendor shipping a kill switch and budget caps says a great deal: runaway agent spend is an observed failure mode, not a hypothesis.
The real lever is your preamble, not your discount
A preprint dated 3 October 2026 compared three agent runtimes on identical tasks, holding the model and the price list fixed. Cost per task varies by up to a factor of three. The main cause is neither context growth nor tool output volume, but the fixed preamble — system prompt and tool schemas — sent at the first call and multiplied by the number of steps.
That is good news, because this item is yours to control. Trimming tool schemas, tightening the system prompt and using caching change the bill at equal quality. At both major providers, cached input costs around a tenth of standard input. Negotiating a 10% token discount has less effect than a properly sized preamble.
Three questions to ask before signing
First question: what is the default cap, who can change it, and what happens when it is reached? A contract with no hard stop is an open-ended commitment. Second question: what is the price of the consumption unit, in writing? If the vendor does not publish it, require it before the order, not after the first month.
Third question: what does a representative month consume at your organisation? It is measured on a limited scope, over a few weeks, before any rollout. Those three answers turn a variable spend into a budget line. Without them, the company discovers its usage cost when the invoice arrives.
| Vendor | What changes | Effective date |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | Usage-based billing by default on new Copilot Business licences in CSP | 1 December 2026 |
| Microsoft | End of sale in CSP for the current add-on offers | 1 December 2026 |
| Odoo | All AI features move to credits bought through IAP | Odoo 20, September 2026 |
| Salesforce | FinOps dashboard, spending caps and agent kill switch | 27 October 2026 |
| SAP | Custom agents free on the managed runtime for selected customers | Through December 2026 |
Sources & methodology
This insight combines cited publications with editorial analysis. Illustrative examples are not client results. Vendor features and terms may change.