As of 1 July, Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Business Premium ship with Copilot built in as the new standard plans, and the standalone Copilot Business licence has gone up in price — that’s straight from Microsoft’s own announcement. If you’re on one of those plans, AI isn’t an optional extra you chose any more. It’s baked into the subscription you’re already paying for, and for a lot of Australian businesses it’s arriving as a quiet line-item change rather than a decision anyone actually made.

The money is the headline, but the part we keep flagging with clients is the data. Copilot only sees what your staff can already see — so the moment you switch it on, every over-shared SharePoint folder and every “the whole company has access” document becomes something an AI can surface in seconds. Across our Northern Beaches and Central West NSW client base the pattern is consistent: permissions were never tidy, and nobody noticed because no one was manually digging through those folders. Copilot digs instantly. (One genuinely useful change worth knowing: Copilot now lets you pick between OpenAI and Anthropic models for a given task.)

So before you lean on it, do three things. Confirm which plan you’re actually being billed for now. Review who can see what across SharePoint and OneDrive. And turn on sensitivity labels for anything genuinely confidential — financials, client lists, contracts. If AI is on your radar, sort the governance first; retrofitting it after a leak is a very bad day.

We help Australian SMBs roll out Microsoft 365 and Copilot without opening the data floodgates. Start with our managed IT support or Microsoft 365 services.