Cost governance
Consumption-based AI spend needs guardrails before rollout, not after the first invoice. This checklist reflects the current Microsoft billing behaviour and the caps your own forecast implies.
Recommended starting position
Peak consumption in the High scenario is £85,508 per month. Set a tenant spending cap of £102,609 per month (20% headroom) and alert at 50 / 80 / 100%.
- Usage-based billing is off by default for enterprise tenants until an admin creates a spending policy — nothing is consumable until you switch it on.
- New Copilot Business purchases have usage-based billing on by default with default limits (from 19 Oct 2026 direct, 2 Nov 2026 CSP).
- Set hard caps at tenant, group and user level before you enable agentic features broadly.
- Configure alerts at 50%, 80% and 100% of each cap, routed to a named budget holder.
- Restrict premium / frontier model families per group — model choice is the single biggest swing factor in credit burn.
- Monitor with /cost in Cowork, the Cost Management dashboard and the Viva Insights consumption dashboard.
- Remember that building an app and running an app are separate meters — a build-heavy month is not your steady state.
Prepaid Copilot Studio tenants have agents disabled at 125% of prepaid capacity. Track Studio consumption separately from seat spend.
Recommended caps and alert thresholds
Advanced governance is a Pro module
Cap recommendations per tenant, department and user, alert thresholds and Studio enforcement risk flags.
Preview Pro locally — no payment required yet.
Want these controls configured in your tenant?
Book a consultation