Here’s your number for the week: $99.

That’s the per-user, per-month price of Microsoft 365 E7 — “The Frontier Suite” — which launches for general availability on May 1, 2026. It bundles M365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Entra Suite, and the new Agent 365 into a single SKU. Buy them separately and you’re looking at $117. E7 saves around 15%.

If you have a Microsoft book of business, your renewal conversations are about to change. The question is whether your customers hear the pitch from you first, or from Microsoft’s direct sales team.

What’s actually in the box

Let’s be precise, because the marketing copy leaves some things strategically vague.

M365 E5 is the existing premium productivity and security suite — the one that’s been Microsoft’s ceiling since 2015. It’s going up to $60/user in July 2026 as part of Microsoft’s previously announced price increases. That increase alone is relevant context for any E3 or E5 renewal conversation you’re having right now.

Microsoft 365 Copilot was a $30/user add-on. In E7, it’s included. Copilot paid seats grew more than 160% year over year in Microsoft’s most recent quarter. Deployments at 35,000-seat scale tripled year over year. The adoption is real. Bundling it at E7 pricing removes the separate buying decision — which removes one of the most common stall points in enterprise AI conversations.

Entra Suite ($12/user separately) is Microsoft’s identity and access management layer — zero trust, conditional access, identity governance. Increasingly non-negotiable for enterprise security posture.

Agent 365 ($15/user separately) is new. This is the one people are confused about, so let me be direct: Agent 365 is a governance and security layer for AI agents. It gives IT administrators visibility and control over agents through Entra, Purview, and Defender. It does not build agents for you. It does not run your agents. If your customer wants to actually build and deploy custom AI agents, they still need separate consumption spending through Copilot Studio or Microsoft Foundry. That’s an important nuance to nail before your first E7 conversation, because if your customer thinks $99/user means “agentic enterprise unlocked,” they’re about to be disappointed — and you’ll be the one explaining it.

Wave 3 is the actual product upgrade

The E7 pricing story is important, but what Microsoft shipped this week on March 9 is bigger than a new SKU.

Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot turns Copilot from an AI assistant into an AI agent inside the apps where people already work. Not a separate app. Not a chat window. Copilot now works alongside you in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook — creating, editing, and refining content from start to finish inside the document itself.

General availability in Word and Excel is now. PowerPoint and Outlook start rolling out over the coming months.

This matters for your pitch because “Copilot writes drafts in a sidebar” was always a soft sell. “Copilot rewrites your whole deck in PowerPoint while you steer it, using context from your last four meetings and the customer’s existing brand kit” is a different conversation.

Copilot Cowork is the most forward-looking piece. Built in close collaboration with Anthropic — Microsoft literally used Anthropic’s Claude technology as part of the technical foundation — Cowork enables long-running, multi-step work that unfolds over time. You can delegate a meaningful project to Copilot — research, document creation, analysis, cross-system coordination — and it works on it for minutes or hours, with visible progress and opportunities to steer. It’s in research preview right now, available through Microsoft’s Frontier program. It’s not what you sell in Q2. It’s what you demo to make E7 look like a ten-year bet, not a twelve-month subscription.

Microsoft’s model diversity angle is also worth noting: E7 customers can access Claude in mainline Copilot chat via the Frontier program, alongside OpenAI’s latest models. Microsoft is not picking one model. They’re building the platform that uses the best model available for each task. That’s the “Work IQ” story: deep contextual intelligence from your organization’s files, meetings, and relationships, regardless of which model is doing the reasoning.

Three plays to make before May 1

Play 1: Get in front of every E3 renewal in your book before Microsoft does.

E3 is at $36/user now, going to $39 in July. The gap between E3 and E7 is $60/user — but the gap in capability is now the full AI transformation story. Most of your E3 customers haven’t had a serious Copilot conversation yet. They need one before they’re renewing at E5 or getting a cold call from a Microsoft territory rep about upgrading to E7. You want to be the one framing that decision, not responding to it after the fact.

Play 2: Build a simple TCO story for E7 vs. E5 + Copilot.

The math is straightforward. E5 (after the July price increase) is $60. Copilot was $30. That’s $90/user — and most organizations still don’t have Copilot deployed. E7 at $99 includes Copilot, Entra Suite, and Agent 365. For any customer sitting on E5 who’s been skeptical about the Copilot add-on pricing, E7 effectively brings Copilot in for $9/user net. That reframes the conversation from “should we buy Copilot” to “should we upgrade to E7.” Those are different conversations with different stakeholders and different yes rates.

Play 3: Lead with governance, not features.

The channel’s track record on AI adoption has been heavy on feature demonstrations and light on implementation rigor. Customers who got excited, bought Copilot, and didn’t drive adoption are now skeptical of the next pitch. Agent 365’s inclusion in E7 is actually the right entry point here — not as a security product, but as a management story. “E7 doesn’t just give your people AI. It gives your IT team visibility and control over every AI agent running in your environment.” That’s how you sell E7 to the CISO and IT Director. Get them on board and the business buyer is much easier.

One thing to watch

SAMexpert’s licensing analysis, published after the March 9 announcement, flagged something worth knowing: Microsoft has been running 15–30% promotional discounts on Copilot throughout 2025 and 2026 without meaningfully moving adoption numbers. The expectation is that E7 will carry similar promotional pricing through channel.

If that’s true, the effective customer price could land well below $99 list. The implication for partners is twofold: First, don’t lead with the list price — get the actual promotional pricing in hand before the customer conversation. Second, if Microsoft is willing to discount E7 aggressively to drive E5-to-E7 migration, you want to be the partner who brought that deal to the table, not the one who found out after the migration happened.

The bottom line

May 1 is seven weeks away. Every Microsoft customer you have is either going to hear about E7 from you, or from someone else.

The bundle math works. The Wave 3 capabilities are real and improving. The governance story is a natural enterprise conversation. The renewal window is open.

Go find your E3 and E5 customers and start the conversation before Microsoft’s direct team does.

Sources: Microsoft Blog — Introducing the First Frontier Suite · SAMexpert — M365 E7 Licensing Guide · Fortune

Cole Hartley is ChannelPulse’s Tech & GTM Editor. He tests the tools, reads the release notes, and writes the playbooks you actually use.