One question at a time, with the words to say next to every field. Pre-fill what you already know, ask the rest live — the number, the licensing call, the billing comparison and the talk track all arrive together at the end, on one page you can print and leave behind.
This works out what Cowork actually costs a specific customer — usually one you already know, with usage numbers you already have. You answer a handful of short questions, one screen at a time, with the words to say out loud printed beside every field for the ones worth confirming with them directly. At the end you get one page — the figure, the arithmetic behind it, what to sell them, and the talk track for the rest of the meeting.
Only someone with an assigned Microsoft 365 Copilot license can use Cowork at all. Everyone else in the company is out of scope for this number — they cost nothing here and they generate nothing. So the question is never “how many employees.” It is “how many licenses.”
Microsoft Learn — Get started with Copilot Cowork, Prerequisites: “An active Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned to your account.” The SKUs and what each one includes are in section 6, the Licensing Snapshot.
Not a job title — just a rough bucket for how someone spends most of their day.
Think in terms of how long the task would take a person, not how it feels to type the prompt.
If the customer — or you, running Cowork internally — already has tasks running, open a task in Cowork chat and type /cost. Enter what three real tasks actually cost and this estimate stops being a model.
Two things to know: /cost shows only what a task has already used — Microsoft doesn't support checking before you run — and it is an in-product approximation, not the billing record. Microsoft Learn — Check credit usage with /cost.