The Real Cost of Digital Labour: Understanding Copilot Licensing in Agentic Workplaces

Digital Labour: More Than Just Automation

The future of work is being shaped by digital labour—intelligent agents that automate, coordinate, and even create value alongside human teams. As your organisation explores agentic solutions, it’s crucial to understand that the cost of digital labour is not just about the technology itself, but about the ongoing investment in authoring, deploying, and running these agents at scale.

Copilot Studio: The Engine for Authoring Digital Labour

Copilot Studio sits at the heart of this transformation, empowering both technical and non-technical staff to become “Agent Makers.” With Copilot Studio, you can build no-code agents that handle everything from customer queries to compliance workflows. But the platform’s power goes further: Copilot Studio can also connect to MCP servers.

What is an MCP server? An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server acts as a secure bridge between your Copilot agents and your organisation’s proprietary systems or databases. By integrating with an MCP server, your agents can fetch real-time data, trigger business processes, or interact with legacy applications—extending digital labour well beyond standard Microsoft 365 environments.

To create truly valuable digital labour, you’ll often need to author agents that interact with your unique business systems. This means designing agents that not only automate tasks within Microsoft 365, but also reach into your own databases, ERPs, or industry-specific platforms via MCP servers. Every time an agent calls an MCP server—whether to check a maintenance request, update a record, or run a calculation—it consumes Copilot Credits. The more your digital labour relies on these integrations, the more important it is to understand and manage your credit usage.

What Are Copilot Credits and Why Do They Matter?

Copilot Credits are the currency for digital labour in Copilot Studio. Every time you author, test, or run an agent—whether it’s a simple data lookup or a complex workflow—credits are consumed. The more sophisticated your digital labour, the more credits you’ll use. For example, a property management agent checking maintenance requests might use 10 credits per call, while a payroll agent running calculations could use 20 credits per transaction.

Licensing Options: Predictable vs Flexible Costs

There are two main ways to pay for Copilot Credits:

• Prepaid Pack: US$200 per month per tenant, including 25,000 credits. This is ideal for organisations with steady or growing digital labour needs.

• Pay As You Go: US$0.01 per credit, billed through Azure. This suits teams piloting agentic solutions or with unpredictable usage.

For small teams or pilot projects, 1,000 credits (enough for 100–200 agentic tasks) might cost just US$10 on PAYG, or be fully covered by the prepaid pack.

The Bigger Picture: Copilot Is Only Part of the Cost

While Copilot licensing is a key input, it’s only one part of the total cost of digital labour. To build, deploy, and scale agentic solutions, you’ll also need to consider:

• Power Platform Licensing: Required for the environment where agents are built and run.

• Dataverse Storage: The secure data layer for agentic solutions, with its own capacity and add-on costs.

• AI Builder: For advanced AI features like document processing or sentiment analysis, billed separately by usage.

These components work together to enable the creation, management, and scaling of digital labour. The true cost of agentic solutions is the sum of these investments—each essential for a robust, compliant, and future-ready workplace.

Real-World Example: Calculating the Cost of Authoring Digital Labour

Imagine your HR team builds an onboarding agent in Copilot Studio. Over a month, it handles 100 onboarding workflows (10 credits each), runs 50 payroll calculations (20 credits each), and stores all records in Dataverse.

• Copilot Credits Used: 100 × 10 + 50 × 20 = 2,000 credits

• Copilot Cost: US$20 on PAYG, or included in the prepaid pack

• Dataverse Storage: Additional cost if you exceed your default allocation

• Power Platform Licence: Required for the environment

• AI Builder: Extra if you use document or image processing

Why This Matters for Business Owners

Understanding these costs upfront allows you to budget accurately, measure ROI, and make informed decisions about scaling digital labour. Copilot Studio makes agentic solutions accessible, but sustainable digital labour requires a holistic view of all licensing and platform costs.

Why Now Is the Time

The workplace is changing. Expectations are rising. Legacy systems are reaching their limits. Human teams are stretched. The need for scalable, intelligent support is clear.

Now is the time to explore, invest in, and plan for digital labour. Organisations that act today will be better positioned to adapt, grow, and lead. They will build workplaces that are not only efficient—but also ethical, resilient, and human-centred.

WorkDynamics is here to help. Our eBook, Designing the Future of Work: Agentic Solutions for Scalable Digital Labour, offers twelve practical approaches to activating digital labour, modernising legacy systems, and building agentic workplaces. It includes real-world examples, frameworks, and access to ready-to-deploy solutions.

Digital labour is the engine. Human-centred innovation is the destination. Let’s build the future of work—together.

Other Articles: What is Digital Labour OR Unlocking Digital Labour: The Agentic Workplace Advantage OR Your Smartest Co-Worker Might Not Be Human