Microsoft’s New $99 Frontier Suite Brings Claude Into Copilot

Microsoft’s biggest enterprise AI announcement yet bundles its Copilot, agent governance platform, and security stack into a single SKU, and brings Claude into mainline Copilot chat for the first time.

Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite, a new enterprise tier that bundles Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent 365, and the full M365 E5 security stack into a single offering priced at $99 per user per month, available May 1. The announcement, made by Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, also includes Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot and the general availability of Agent 365 at $15 per user.

The centerpiece of the E7 tier is what Microsoft calls Work IQ; an intelligence layer that gives Copilot and agents context about how an organisation works, who collaborates with whom, and what content is being used. The argument Microsoft is making is that models alone, without this embedded work context, produce generic outputs. Work IQ is positioned as the differentiator that makes Copilot more accurate and more trusted than AI tools built on models and connectors alone.

Zero-shot artifact creation is nothing more than a parlor trick. Real differentiation comes from intelligence — deep work context, embedded in the tools people already use.
Judson Althoff, CEO Commercial Business, Microsoft

Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot brings updated agentic experiences across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, including the ability for employees to build their own agents within the canvas they already work in. Critically, Claude is now available in mainline Copilot chat via the Frontier programme, alongside the latest generation of OpenAI models. Microsoft is explicitly framing Copilot as model-diverse, running across OpenAI and Anthropic without locking customers to a single model or cloud. Also announced in research preview is Copilot Cowork, built in collaboration with Anthropic, enabling long-running multi-step tasks that unfold over time.

Agent 365, Microsoft’s control plane for AI agents, will be generally available on May 1 at $15 per user. In its preview phase, tens of millions of agents have been registered in the Agent 365 Registry, with tens of thousands of enterprise customers already using it to govern AI agents across workflows. Microsoft itself is using Agent 365 internally and reports visibility into more than 500,000 agents company-wide, generating over 65,000 responses per day for employees in the past 28 days alone.

What’s in Microsoft 365 E7: The Frontier Suite: $99/user/month, GA May 1

The commercial momentum behind Copilot is significant. Microsoft reported paid seats growing more than 160% year over year, with daily active usage up ten times. The number of customers deploying Copilot at significant scale, defined as more than 35,000 seats, tripled year over year. Recent enterprise rollouts include Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Fiserv, ING, the US Department of the Interior, and Westpac. 90% of the Fortune 500 now use Copilot in some form.

The E7 pricing is deliberate. At $99 per user, it sits below what buying Copilot, Agent 365, and E5 separately would cost. The bundling strategy is designed to move enterprise customers from scattered AI experimentation toward a single, governed, full-stack deployment, and to make the governance layer as much a selling point as the AI itself.

This article is based on a blog post published by Judson Althoff on the Official Microsoft Blog on March 9, 2026. Quotes are reproduced directly from the source.

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