
Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast · 2026-03-26 · 34 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
65 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Microsoft's announcement of the E7 plan represents a significant shift in Microsoft 365 licensing strategy, particularly around AI capabilities and agentic experiences. The plan bundles Microsoft 365 E5 ($60/month starting July 2026), Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30/month), Entra Suite ($12/month), and Agent365 ($15/month add-on) into a single $99/month offering. Ben and Scott dissect the value proposition from a partner and customer perspective, noting that Entra Suite was already bundled with E5, making the real innovation Copilot and Agent365. The critical unresolved question is whether Agent365 licensing applies only to administrators managing agents or to all end users benefiting from agentic governance - a distinction that dramatically impacts cost for large enterprises. They also explore the Wave 3 Copilot features including Copilot Cowork (built on Anthropic's Claude), agents in Office apps with MCP support, and persistent frustration that Microsoft hasn't integrated Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers into native M365 Copilot chat. Scott advocates for one extensible Copilot platform with MCP governance rather than the current proliferation of separate Copilot products. Partner enablement begins April 1, 2026, with Agent365 becoming an eligible workload for cloud solution provider accelerators.
E7 bundles Microsoft 365 E5 (moving to $60/month in July 2026), Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30/month), Entra Suite ($12/month), and Agent365 ($15/month) into a single $99/month plan starting April 1, 2026 - though Entra Suite was already included with E5.
Ben and Scott cannot determine from available documentation whether Agent365 licensing applies only to administrators managing agents or to all end users benefiting from agent governance, a critical distinction that could cost 8,000-person enterprises millions versus thousands annually.
Copilot Cowork, built on Anthropic's Claude platform, is part of Copilot Wave 3 and enables multi-step agentic tasks like reading PDFs, renaming files, and spawning sub-agents within Microsoft 365 Copilot.
No - MCPs are only supported in custom agents built in Copilot Studio, not in native M365 Copilot chat, which the hosts identify as a major gap driving enterprise users to Claude for tasks requiring external tool integration.
Starting April 1, 2026, Microsoft is rolling Agent365 adoption into partner enablement programs, making E5-to-E7 upsells and Agent365 co-sells eligible workloads for CSP accelerators and growth lever incentives.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode contains useful practical details about E7 pricing ($99/month), licensing ambiguities, and feature gaps (MCP integration), but spends substantial time on exploratory discussion and speculation about how features *might* work rather than delivering concrete insights. Much of the conversation circles around unanswered questions (Agent 365 per-user licensing, MCP integration roadmap) without resolution, diluting density.
Agent ID is a $15 a month add on. That to me, I'm maybe there's gonna be some more stuff that comes out in the next month. I have a hard time digesting that based on what I've seen comparing a normal tenant versus a tenant with agent
does Agent three sixty five have to be licensed for every user that is touching an agent that's managed or governed by Agent three sixty five, or does it only have to be licensed by those admins that are using Agent three sixty five on the administrative side? I haven't been able to decipher which boat this falls into
The hosts raise valid structural critiques (licensing confusion, MCP integration gaps, the oversaturation of Copilot variants) that are somewhat fresh for a technical podcast, but the core analytical framework - cost-benefit analysis of Microsoft bundles - is standard. The observation about needing one extensible Copilot instead of 20 variants is sensible but not particularly novel thinking.
We would not need 20 or 30 or 40 Copilots. We would have one Copilot with MCPs
The easy integration of MCP servers and allowing end users... I will flip over to Claude from Microsoft three sixty five
The two hosts appear to be experienced Microsoft operators (one states "I'm a PM at Microsoft") with hands-on experience managing tenants, testing features in preview, and interacting with customers. They have direct access to preview environments (Agent 365, Claude in Copilot) and real client interaction data. However, neither is introduced formally, and no company/title context is provided in the transcript, limiting verification of scale and impact.
I'm a PM at Microsoft, I can tell you it's not that easy
That was actually on a call with a client this morning, and we were talking about that. We pulled up our two admin centers together, like admin.microsoft.com, and we're comparing what he had versus what I had
The episode includes concrete numbers (E7 $99/month, E5 $60, Copilot $30, Agent 365 $15; Entra Suite $12; Claude/ChatGPT $200/month) and specific product names (Agent 365, Copilot Cowork, MCP, Researcher, WorkIQ). However, much discussion lacks specificity: licensing uncertainty is acknowledged but not resolved, feature comparisons are vague, and claimed customer reactions ("they were not, oh, no. There's no way we're doing that") lack detail or numbers. No data on adoption, usage, or ROI.
E fives also, like, July, Sometime, July. E five is going up to $60 a month. Copilot's already $30 a month. There's your $90 a month. Agent ID is essentially costing you $9 a month
I have customers that are 8,000 employees. That's not an insignificant amount of money
The hosts demonstrate solid peer-to-peer dialogue with natural follow-ups and shared problem-solving (clarifying Entra bundling, jointly investigating MCP gaps, confirming Claude availability in real-time). Questions like "does Agent 365 have to be licensed per-user?" and explorations of governance tradeoffs show genuine curiosity. However, there is no external guest to push back against, limiting conversational tension. The hosts agree frequently and rarely challenge each other's premises directly.
Yeah. I wasn't able to parse it myself either. So like you said, per user, per maybe, like, number of agents, like, a particular user consumes
I don't have it in Researcher yet, but I do have it in chat. Go figure. I wonder if I did something and blocked it in Researcher.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Welcome to Episode 424 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben and Scott dig into the newly announced Microsoft 365 E7 SKU which bundles M365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Microsoft Entra Suite, and Microsoft Agent 365. Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Welcome to episode 424 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast, recorded live 02/09/2026. This is a show about Microsoft three sixty five five and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott get back together again with a plan for one topic that suddenly goes awry with the recent announcement of the new Microsoft three sixty five e seven plan. So instead of talking about GPOs and configuration policies, we postpone that for a future episode and dive into the world of the up and coming e seven plan, what's included in this plan, and our perception of its value.
With this announcement and the inclusion of Microsoft three sixty five Copilot in the e seven plan, we also discuss some of the new features coming to Microsoft three sixty five Copilot wave three that were announced at the same time. So let's talk about Microsoft three sixty five e seven. We should talk about e seven. I wanna open with this, and maybe this is a little bit of a different way to go with this.
Okay. I'm gonna start maybe not from the hero entry point, which would be like a raw, like, super, here's the user value of this to you Yep. But rather from the partner angle. So I always think it's interesting how Microsoft interacts with partners.
There's a massive partner ecosystem, and they very much rely on partners to co sell and upsell opportunities to customers. Like, everybody wins. Microsoft makes money, partners make money, and customers get the functionality that they're looking for all for the same price along the way. So I'm gonna start with the partner blog and just read you a couple of things.
So Microsoft three sixty five is the frontier suite designed for a human led agent operated enterprise turning human intent into AI action that functions securely and at scale. To accomplish this, Microsoft three sixty five e seven includes access to Microsoft agent three sixty five, which is the control plane to govern and scale agents. Okay. Yeah.
Like you said, here's an e seven. It's got some new stuff in it primarily and including access to AI experiences and Microsoft Agent three sixty five. All all good. Now here's the thing.
So starting on 04/01/2026, to accelerate Microsoft three sixty five e five to Microsoft three sixty five e seven upsell and Agent three sixty five adoption, Copilot plus Power Accelerate are going to include agent three sixty five across immersion briefings, envisioning, and proof of concept engagements, as well as deployment accelerators. And all of these things are now gonna be included as eligible workloads for core tier one strategic product accelerators and growth levers for cloud solution providers.
So prepare thyself. Even if you didn't know what an e seven was or know that it's coming, you are about to know as your resellers. You're in this boat yourself saying, hey. Yep.
Out there working in the partner ecosystem and selling to customers. If you were getting tired of hearing about AI, guess what? You're not gonna be able to take a nap anytime soon. I have a couple of issues.
I'm gonna take issue with a couple of things in here. One, Microsoft three sixty five e seven bundles, Microsoft three sixty five e five, Microsoft three sixty five Copilot, EntraSweet, and Agent three sixty five. Yes. That is true.
However, EntraSweet was already announced that it was going to be included with e five. Dev hole is always in the details. Yes. Technically, that's true.
You're getting EntraSweet with an e seven, but you were getting it already with an e five. So it's not that's not a value add for the e seven. It's really Microsoft three sixty five Copilot and Agent three sixty five is the way I would phrase it because everybody that's already on e five gets EntraSweet. That being said, this is not a bad deal if you are interested if you're gonna use Copilot.
E fives also, like, July, Sometime, July. E five is going up to $60 a month. Copilot's already $30 a month. There's your $90 a month.
Agent ID is essentially costing you $9 a month. This is also an add on. This is the part that surprised me. Agent ID or agent ID.
Agent ID is not it. Agent $3.65 is a $15 a month add on. That to me, I'm maybe there's gonna be some more stuff that comes out in the next month.
I have a hard time digesting that based on what I've seen comparing a normal tenant versus a tenant with agent because I do have it on in preview in mind. That was actually on a call with a client this morning, and we were talking about that. We pulled up our two admin centers together, like admin.microsoft.
com, and we're comparing what he had versus what I had because, frankly, I kind of forgot what it looked like before Agent $380 a month, I was struggling with the cost of this. Again, maybe there's more features coming, but it looked like to me it was really just a lot of data and reporting that's an Agent three sixty five, a few governance things that are in there, but you already have some of it in just normal Microsoft three sixty five. So it'll be interesting to see where that goes.
The other thing with this that I have not been able to figure out is, does Agent three sixty five have to be licensed for every user that is touching an agent that's managed or governed by Agent three sixty five, or does it only have to be licensed by those admins that are using Agent three sixty five on the administrative side? Because Agent three sixty five is really a governance construct Very much so. Not really an end user focused thing. Some of the licensing gets phrased where every user that benefits from this service has to be licensed for it, which would push this to everybody.
There's other ones that are, like, only the people actually doing the config, the administration. That type of stuff have to be licensed for it. And I haven't been able to decipher which boat this falls into where do you end up with e sevens for admins and e fives plus Copilot for everybody else, or how is this gonna shake out? Because $15 a month for a client or client customer I have customers that are 8,000 employees.
That's not an insignificant amount of money. Yeah. I wasn't able to parse it myself either. So like you said, per user, per maybe, like, number of agents, like, a particular user consumes.
Because if you look across, I think, any large enterprise, you're probably gonna have folks who use these things even if they're licensed for them and those who don't, and you're gonna have varying levels of consumption there. So I know, like, across the folks that I work with, I'll start with, like, kind of like my hyperlocal team, a lot of us use things like WorkIQ. We use M365 Copilot with lots of modes in there. Like, I have access to both when I use, like, the researcher agent, I have built access to GPT five and Claude.
We're all in this mode of kinda trying to sometimes, I think, emulate other features that exist in other properties. So, like, one of the interesting things here is Copilot Cowork, which is built on anthropics or Claude Cowork. Okay. So Claude Cowork is really cool.
I'm actually kind of excited to see that and have that. But if I'm using Claude Cowork, is that, like, one thing that I'm using, or is that all the underlying subtasks and sub agents that I push out? Because, like, hey. In Claude Cowork, I can do things like go into this folder on my desktop and re and read the contents of these PDFs and rename them all in this format, blah blah blah.
And it can touch out and it can do that. And I can have it spider out and do all sorts of weird things. I'm wondering if m three sixty five co works and do the same thing, but then then, you know, I become a heavy consumer of agentic experiences where the person who's sitting next to me who maybe doesn't need these things realize them, that value is not inflicted upon them to go ahead and pick them up. Like, are you gonna have to license them and have them come through just because they're part of the organization and because they opened up Microsoft three sixty five Copilot once?
I don't know. But we'll see. It's gonna be a really weird time at TrueUp when these things come through. Yeah.
I missed the Copilot co work that's coming as I was reading through these too. That'll be interesting because that, yeah, brings in some of the multi step tasks. I'm still waiting. I don't see anything about it in here.
I should look for this article or or look through here. Chat and Copilot, agents and chat. MC I was looking for MCPs to see if there was any updates in MCPs, and it's only mentioned once in here. Where it's chat and Copilot, agents for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, let you move into app native work with agents in Copilot supporting open standards like agent SDK and MCP apps.
Agents and Copilot. I mean, you can kind of already do MCPs and agents. Well, you can do agents. You can't do MCPs and Copilot.
Can't you do like, if you go build an agent in Studio, you can incorporate MCPs? If I build it in Studio, but I think that's a very different experience because then we're talking then we're talking about Copilot Studio, not m three sixty five Copilot, not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot. We got a lot of Copilots here. Like, it's it's Oprah has handed them Planes only have one Copilot.
Why do we need, like, 20 Copilots for working? Because more agents, more money, I guess. We'll see where that goes. I'm still like, I would really like to see both OpenAI with Chat GPT on the desktop and Microsoft.
They'll bring in the ability to integrate MCPs with the native chat experiences. I think that would be a big win and low hanging fruit, especially if you're doing things like Claude Cowork style now with Copilot Cowork. Like, that would be a really powerful thing. Not just go read all these PDFs and renaming them in this format, but maybe go read all these PDFs, rename them in this format.
And then once you've done that, create an inventory of them and go create a Power BI report or go and update this system over here with this information, you know, depending on the the connectivity and things that are out there and available to you, or heck, just to, like, be able to extend the the capabilities of these LLM driven experiences. We think about, like, remote MCPs and things like you and I, like, in our day to day, both use the Microsoft Learn MCP server and have that integrated in.
Like, hey. It's there. It's available. I would love to have that in just a native Copilot chat and be able to augment things, like, in my worlds.
Hey. If I'm writing a a product requirements document like a PRD, it would be super cool if I could not only have that PRD, like, evaluate it for tone and grammar and correctness and things like that. Wouldn't it be, like, nifty if I could bounce a PRD across and up against, like, public documentation to see maybe where I'm right, where I'm wrong, where I'm breaking something, especially if I'm thinking about an ideating experience that builds on top of existing functionality or constructs?
Like, today, I can do that, but I have to build a custom experience to do it or rely on somebody else to build me a custom experience to do it. It'd be kinda cool if that stuff was just, like, their native baked in ready to go. So I think there's the it's all to say there's a lot more integration points that they can do with m three sixty five Copilot and the desktop experience of it and just the declarative agents. And I think they could open up a whole ecosystem of consumption, like, just raw consumption.
If they've Oh, yeah. If that's what the game is, raw consumption and being able to offer customers these experiences at their expense, like, hey. We're paying for licensing, potentially add ons, Even without, like, opportunities to expand into, like, PAYGo or, like, burst pricing, should I go beyond a certain limit or should my organization? Like, I think there's a lot of runway there to just introduce experiences.
So, like, this starts to open it up a little bit, but I don't know. Like you, I was looking maybe for, like, different things and different enablers in there for getting it going. This episode is brought to you by Trusted Tech. If you're managing Microsoft three sixty five, you already know licensing isn't simple.
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Right? Like, we could talk all day about our Chad GPT's response is better, our Claude's response is better, Copilot better, all of that. Just from a pure technology enablement perspective, if I was gonna give one area where I feel like Copilot is falling way behind, it's that right there. The easy integration of MCP servers and allowing end users.
And, again, I get you still would need some governance controls in place because enterprises don't want their users just going out connecting to any MCP server. But, hey, Agent three sixty five is there. You can build that control plane. Like like, the ability to build that exists within the ecosystem.
Figuring out how to integrate MCP servers into Microsoft three sixty five chat, that is one of it's not the only, but it's the number one re one of the top reasons I will flip over to Claude from Microsoft three sixty five is because of I have up to, like, 11 or 12 MCP servers now. Control plane governance idea for Microsoft is build a control plane and build the capability to put MCPs in m three sixty five Copilot. Leave it, like, so it's wide open and it can be locked down, and enterprises can push MCPs to certain, like, business organizations with known configurations.
So like you said, given the operational control, like, oh, hey. You can play with the, I don't know, you can play with the Azure MCP server, which has hundreds of tools in it, but only people in this division or this business team or with this set of responsibilities get it, and we're gonna preconfigure it for you. So authentication's gonna be locked in, all those kinds of things. Or I can't think of a good example off my head, but, like, the Kusto MCP, you can configure a bunch of, like, Kusto MCP servers in it.
Same thing. Like, I'm gonna push this down to you, and you're only gonna be allowed to connect to these Kusto servers, not these other ones through these kinds of things. Right. And I think if Microsoft was to do that, it would actually probably do some interesting things in the MCP ecosystem.
I wonder if it would actually lead to, like, a collaboration opportunity with Anthropic to bring in, like, additional operational controls or, like, extensions to that protocol to be able to make those things Yeah. A little bit easier. You know what else this would help with? We may have talked about this before too.
We would not need 20 or 30 or 40 Copilots. We would have one Copilot with MCPs. And then Azure Storage, you can go build your MCP. Security team, you go build an MCP.
Sentinel, you go build an MCP. Let's not reinvent Copilot 50 times. Let's create one Copilot, make it extensible, governable, manageable, configurable from an MCP perspective, and let all these different teams build MCP servers that you tie into your Copilot. Scott, we should go work for Microsoft, go fix this, and then quit six months later.
Have you seen that meme? There's lots of things that I would like to do. And as a PM at Microsoft, I can tell you it's not that easy. I wish it was.
Like, I I would love to wave my magic wand in a couple of these areas. And it's easy to Do all the things. Armchair design on it, but it does leave interesting opportunities to kind of continue to extend it out. I do wonder, like, as this kind of keeps coming, so you think about things like WorkIQ, Agent three sixty five, Copilot integrations within the Office Suite, like Excel, Word, things like that.
Is this where it stops or is this, like, the start to some of these licensing experiences? So, like, is m three sixty five E seven kinda like the stopping point or then do you still get a bunch of add ons and other things in it? Because, I mean, if you think about it, like OpenAI, Claude, they're charging $200 a month for their professional ones, and those are just for access to the LLMs and the underlying functionality, like these agentic experiences, things like that, really, in, like, Microsoft land.
You're getting the Office Suite. You're getting all the identity, all the governance, all the management that comes from Entra and Intune, SharePoint, Exchange, these different things. Like, it still feels like there's other room in there too. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if this is kinda the end versus the start.
You don't think they're gonna keep going with an e nine? I don't think this is the end of the licensing conundrum. Like, it will not stop at $99 a month. It won't stop.
No. 100%. It'll keep going up. And I was again, I was talking to a client about this morning, and I was surprised they were not like, they saw this, and they were not, oh, no.
There's no way we're doing that. It was a we're already paying $60 for e five and 30 for Copilot, and this governance question comes up more and more with everybody creating agents and the ability to create agents is this $99 a month does not feel unreasonable for what you get. Again, I would like to see a little bit more functionality come out in Agent three sixty five, and it's still in preview. It we very well may see that particular product to continue to evolve or even in the next, what?
It's March. We have March, April. We have two more months. There may be some stuff they're working on that's gonna pop up in there in the next couple months that really help because they do say Agent three sixty five.
There's a we'll put the link in the show notes. There's a nice table they have in there where you're getting observe, monitor, and manage agents in real time. You're getting governed agents through their life cycle, and you're getting secure and protect all agents across your enterprise with Agent three sixty five. Those are kind of the three things you're getting with that particular product.
And then, again, they throw in that chart, the Entra Suite for $12 a month and say, oh, look. It's only 99. If you're listening to this, ignore the Entra Suite. It's gonna be bundled in the $60 one anyways.
It's devils in the details there. You mentioned kinda talking about this maybe with a couple customers. I was maybe a little bit surprised by the phrasing or positioning of this. Like, I could have seen this as Microsoft three sixty five e seven, like, the ultimate enterprise suite or whatever it happened to be.
And it was it's being framed as the frontier workers suite. So when I think about, like, the phrasing of Frontier in AI land, primarily, that's been positioned around the Frontier AI companies, the Frontier models like chat g p like OpenAI training GPT and Anthropic training Claude, things like that. Like, there's only a handful of frontier models out there and frontier model trainers. I kinda looked at that.
I was like, oh, is this targeted just at those companies? Like, that was weird to me in my head. And I guess it's being positioned as companies on the frontier of consumption of AI experiences, which is also an interesting way to kind of frame it. I don't know.
If you put it out there and buy it for yourselves, like, do you consider yourself on the cutting edge, or do you just consider yourself, like, hey. Like you said, it's easy to rationalize the pricing for these things if I'm already paying 60 here, 90 here, 10 here kinda thing. You get to the price pretty quick. I didn't think too much about the phrasing of it.
I kinda glanced at it. I saw the frontier transformations. As you're talking about it, I think it is absolutely confusing for a couple reasons. One, what you said.
They say in this article, frontier transformation starts with a simple idea. AI must do more than optimize what already exists, unlocking new levels of creativity, innovation, and growth. So I think in here, they're maybe thinking about it as unlocking the next level of AI in a company. But to me, it also gets confusing is have you seen that in Copilot, you also have the Frontier program in Copilot, which is essentially the beta preview features of Copilot.
So when they come out with different agents or different innovations within Copilot, it goes from, like, I guess, maybe private preview, whatever comes before public availability, then it comes to the Frontier program. So if you can go, like, get signed up for the Frontier experiences, which is just a fancy way of saying beta experiences for preview. I think about it as like the old TAP programs, like technology. I think technology access previews was what those were.
Yeah. Only I don't know that this is NDA as like the TAP stuff was. I think it's a little bit more accessible to the public, but that phrasing confuses me when I start when you start thinking about powering Frontier transformation. I think they're thinking about Frontier the same way in both of those as being kind of on the cutting edge, the leading edge, pushing everything forward, but it's still two different kind of programs where I think the terminology, it just gets confusing?
I mean, I can put the mental mapping together, but it was a little interesting. Right? Like, if I'm if I'm the purchasing decision maker and I don't know what frontier models are, and I think that's just general phrasing of frontier versus early access and some of the other things that have been out there in the ecosystem for a long time. And maybe I'm just being like old man yells at cloud, right?
I've got my gray hair and I'm curmudgeon, but it is a weird kind of positioning. I can see where it gets some, but I also wonder. We'll see where it goes. I'd be interested in hearing anecdotes as you're out there talking to more customers and seeing some of that stuff.
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That's intelligink.com/podcast for more information or to schedule a thirty minute call to get started with them today. Remember, Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud so you can focus on your business. I'll definitely keep you updated as I talk to people about it and see what people are saying about the Frontier transformation or the powering Frontier transformation, the new e seven licenses.
I don't think there was anything else really in that article, multimodel intelligence, agent three sixty five. Yeah. The Frontier suite. Available May 1.
I don't know. I think we mentioned that. That's when you'll be able to go get it, go buy it. But this kind of is all bundled in wave three.
So I would also even if you're not interested in e seven, go read these articles that we'll post in here because it does talk about, like, wave three of Copilot and, like, the Copilot co work that you mentioned is not necessarily an e seven aspect to it. E seven was just kind of bundled in this article that talks about all the Wave three improvements to Microsoft three sixty five Copilot. I think there's some exciting things in there, and then there's also just the general churn and kind of pace that we're in right now.
So one of the things that kinda got to me was and, you know, this is again, like, old maniels at cloud kinda thing, but it's still thinking back. And I don't think enterprises have changed this much where you still have to do, like, enterprise training programs, get people up to speed on here's Word, here's Excel. You hire a new, like, frontline worker, things like that. They kinda continue to play around with the names of things there.
So if you look at Copilot within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, things like that, they've been on this journey of, like, Copilot there to Copilot agents, and now they're just kinda, like, built in. And that freeze and goes. And that all happened over the course of not too long. Like, you're not talking, like, a decade to get there.
You're talking, like, a year to two years and potentially less time as that stuff turns around. That kinda struck me was, yes. You can go and empower your organizations with these things. Like, maybe you do.
But I do wonder about, like, the human lift to get people to really understand these tools and how they work and, frankly, where the rough edges are versus, like, the real value within any given business. I think that's gonna still take some time to shake out. It was also interesting to see, and this is interesting given, like, the current climate in The US and things that are going on, some of the call outs and some of the additional work that they're doing to integrate Claude into more and more of the stack.
So if you're an m three 65 customer today at a tenant level, you can kinda choose if you have access to anthropic models within within your tenant and within your deployments. So that's been there for a while. That that operational control, it's been interesting things wave three bought was or is bringing is claw just available in mainline chat. So, you know, if you've been following the news I saw that.
So if you've been following the news in The United States, anthropic was declared a supply chain risk by the Department of Defense. And that has, like, downstream impacts of anthropic being able to be consumed within not only the Department of Defense, but also, like, broader US government and defense contractors and all sorts of things. Interesting that continues to, like, kinda steam ahead at least in regular Copilot. Now don't get me wrong.
I'm very glad to see it there. I think the anthropic models are we talked about this. So if you're gonna spend $20 a month on on some AI thing, go by Claude. That's probably the best one.
Does all the MCP integrations, but, also, the responses are very well tuned for, like, enterprise and business in a way that ChatGPT is not, and by extension, Copilot running the ChatGPT models is not as well. So I'm very excited to see Claude coming. Like, this makes me wanna go and just kinda keep, like, opening and closing the chat, the Microsoft three sixty five app and seeing if it becomes available a little earlier in the tenant that I play along with. So having that the other thing I don't know, having that model choice is, like, really cool to me.
I do wonder about that for users, though. Like, are you gonna re really teach your people in finance, like, hey. When you're working with this Excel workbook, make sure you flip it to Claude. When you're working over here on this Word document, make sure you flip it to OpenAI.
Oh, when you're working over here, make sure you not only flip it to OpenAI, but flip it to this model. Like, I don't know if it's gonna get that far, but that was always a little bit of friction and consumption of and kinda being able to pick up some of those things. So we shall see where this one goes. I imagine you're gonna go and buy this stuff and get hands on with it, so I'll get lots of Ben feedback on it.
Yeah. I'll go buy it. I'll have to go redo my licensing and cancel some and buy other ones and sort through all that mess. You talk about model switching, I bet it's not gonna it's gonna depend on your users.
But I don't maybe not business. I'm so used to in any AI tool, whether it's Cloud or ChatGPT, of being able to go pick which Visual Studio code for that matter, being able to pitch pick which model I wanna use and do all of that, I feel like that's going to become just a normal thing. I think you and I are the outliers. We would be atypical to a general frontline worker that that that's out there and running through things.
And not even frontline workers. I think workers across the, really, the nontechnical divisions within our organization. So if you're in HR, finance, legal, things like that, I think you'll be able to guide customers to a certain point, but there's a bunch of mental overhead and friction kind of along the way there. And you even saw that in the kind of commercial models and releases over time.
Right? There was a period of time where they didn't refer to, like, even OpenAI with ChatGPT where they started referring to things like the model names. I remember when ChatGPT five launched and it was strawberry and they had, like, cuter code names to them so you didn't have to decipher the numbers and the codes and things behind it. I think that is a general friction point.
I hope that improves. Like, a lot of these, like, agentic experiences are kinda getting better at directing into certain models. And I've also seen companies, and I don't know how this will work in m three sixty five Copilot land, but certainly within, like, custom applications, there's a lot of companies that are kind of spinning up around the LLM proxy interface. So, like, go ahead and route all your requests to me, and I'll help you choose the best model based on the intentionality of your request.
So there's a little bit of overhead there, right, to evaluate the prompt the user sent in and whatever, but could potentially save you a whole bunch of money when you're talking about executing some of these models. I need to go figure out how to get Claude to show I still don't have Claude in any of my m three sixty five. Like, Researcher doesn't have Claude by chat. I only have it in Researcher today.
I'm looking forward to getting it in chat, though, if this is coming. See, I want it in chat too. I'm kinda surprised I don't see it in Researcher yet. Maybe I'm gonna have to go make sure I actually have all my settings set properly for You might have blocked it.
Copilot. Maybe. I have a tendency to fiddle. Or you gotta make sure your play your tenant's in a place where you're allowed to have it.
So I made this mistake at work. I was showing I was showing some folks researcher with Claude and, like, how much more I liked it, and they happen to be over in Germany where due to kinda local laws, they're not allowed to have it. It's been locked out and done due to the worker council over there. That's another interesting thing I think to think about too is depending on your business, are you national, international, all those things?
Can you can you float it? Like, is it actually are you gonna be able to give a consistent experience to your users? Scott, I just clicked in my settings in my chat in, like, my m three sixty five Copilot app in chat. I went to settings, and I had an update.
So I clicked the update button, and now in my chat, I can choose between Claude Sonnet and GPT. There you go. Look at that. It's just an update away from you.
I don't have it in Researcher yet, but I do have it in chat. Go figure. I wonder if I did something and blocked it in Researcher. Who knows?
You gotta dive to, like, the seventh level of the admin center to figure figure out the operational control all the way down there at the bottom. Yeah. Apparently. I have this bad habit of fiddling with my tenant to figure stuff out, and then I forget that I fiddled with it and something doesn't work, and it's really my own fault.
Look at that. We were gonna talk about GPU and Intune today. We spent the whole time on e e sevens and everything that's coming there. So I'm kinda curious for folks that are out there and listening, like, give us a ping on LinkedIn, on the podcast account, or give Ben and I a tag.
Like, if you're thinking about adopting the e seven or not adopting it or kind of what's interesting to you as a consumer there. I think there's a bunch of interesting ways to kind of to kinda go with this one for customers. 100%. And we'll have to come back to GPOs and Intune at another time.
Well, we got all the notes and everything for it. So I think Yeah. Exactly. Next time.
Alright. Well, thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. Enjoy your day.
Yeah. Like you said, let us know your thoughts on e seven. Look forward to hearing from people. Thanks, Ben.
Thanks, Scott. Talk to you next time. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office three sixty five and Azure.
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