Copilot

Microsoft is giving away 25 Copilot licences for 30 days. Here's how it actually works.

Genmar ITAugust 20267 min read

Microsoft has opened a trial that most businesses we speak to haven't heard of: 25 Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences, free, for 30 days. It runs until 31 December 2026, and it has to be set up through a Microsoft partner rather than bought online.

Below is a summary of the terms: what the offer includes, who is eligible, what falls outside it, and the auto-renewal condition attached to it. Microsoft's own write-up for partners is linked at the end.

What the offer includes

Licences: 25 — a fixed number, whatever your headcount
Duration: 30 days from the day it's provisioned
Cost: £0
Product: Microsoft 365 Copilot Business — the full paid version
Limit: One trial per company
Closes: 31 December 2026

This is the full product rather than a demo or sandbox environment. The 25 nominated users get the same functionality as a paying customer, working inside Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint on their own email, documents and meetings. Copilot accesses only the content each user already has permission to open — which is why the permissions point below matters.

Who's eligible

Microsoft's published terms cover businesses on Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard or Business Premium, with fewer than 300 Copilot-eligible users.

Two points are worth confirming against your own tenant rather than assuming, because Microsoft's own materials aren't perfectly consistent on them:

Business Basic. The eligibility notes include it; the targeting guidance points at Standard and Premium. Worth asking specifically if you're on Basic.
Existing Copilot seats. The offer is aimed at businesses new to Copilot. If you already pay for a handful of licences, ask whether that rules your tenant out before you plan around it.

Education, non-profit and government community cloud tenants aren't covered — this is the standard commercial licence.

Businesses with fewer than 25 staff are still eligible. The trial is fixed at 25 seats regardless of headcount, so a company of 18 can cover everyone.

What it doesn't include

The seat count is fixed at 25. It cannot be reduced or increased. Businesses with more than 25 staff need to decide which users are allocated a licence.

The 30 days cannot be extended. The period runs from the date the licences are provisioned, so the start date is worth choosing around holidays and known busy periods.

One trial per company. It cannot be paused partway through and resumed later, and a second trial is not available once the first has run.

Copilot Studio and Copilot Cowork are not included. Agent-building and Cowork are licensed and charged separately, so any work involving custom agents sits outside the trial.

Auto-renewal: the condition to check

By default these trials convert automatically into a paid 25-seat subscription at the end of the 30 days. The conversion is not prompted or confirmed with you first: it starts a 12-month commitment, with a seven-day cancellation window from the date it begins.

At current UK list pricing, 25 seats is approximately £4,800 per year.

Auto-renewal is a setting, and whoever provisions the trial can switch it off before it begins. With it disabled, the trial ends at 30 days unless you choose to purchase.

Ask for auto-renewal to be disabled at setup, and ask for written confirmation that it has been.

It takes one click before the trial starts, and it is considerably harder to unwind once a 12-month term has begun.

Four factors that determine the result

Review file permissions first.
Copilot can surface any file a person already has permission to open, which in most tenants is more than the business expects — legacy HR folders, finance spreadsheets, documents shared with “everyone” years ago and never revoked. A permissions review before the trial starts typically takes a couple of hours and is worth doing independently of any AI rollout.
Select the 25 users deliberately.
Two approaches work. Spreading the licences across several teams shows you where Copilot is used most; concentrating them in one department around a single process — tender responses, month-end close, client reporting — tests that process in more depth. Either produces usable evidence. Allocating on request order does not.
Train the users on their own work.
Adoption depends heavily on whether people are shown how to prompt effectively. Around two hours of training using their own documents, inboxes and meetings is the single biggest factor in whether a trial generates meaningful usage data or very little.
Measure against a baseline.
Record how long the tasks you care about take before the trial begins. The Copilot admin centre then reports weekly active users out of the 25 and which apps Copilot was used in. Weekly usage is a more reliable indicator than feedback surveys. At the end you can expand, buy a smaller number of seats, or stop.

How to get it

The trial has to be provisioned by a Microsoft partner. If you already work with one, ask them about it — they can set it up for you, and it costs you nothing.

We are provisioning these for businesses across Hertfordshire, Essex and Cambridgeshire until the offer closes. On every trial we set up we disable auto-renewal as standard, carry out the permissions review beforehand at no charge, and include the user training session.

Either way, the offer closes on 31 December 2026.

Microsoft's own summary of the offer is published on its partner blog: Copilot activation for FY27. Some partner pages require a Microsoft Partner sign-in to view.