Copilot renewal windows are arriving across Irish organisations just as Microsoft 365 prices rise. Before signing, there is one question worth asking — and three honest answers to it.
A wave of Copilot renewal decisions is landing on Irish desks this year, and the timing is awkward. Microsoft 365 suite prices rise by 5–16% on 1 July 2026. The licences that were bought on an act-of-faith business case two years ago now have to justify themselves at a higher price point, with two years of usage data sitting in the tenant.
Most renewal conversations skip the data and go straight to the negotiation. That is backwards. The question to ask before renewing Copilot is simpler and harder: based on what the usage data actually shows, what is this licence pool for?
What the data usually shows
We spend a lot of time inside Microsoft 365 tenants, and the pattern is remarkably consistent with what the industry analyses from 2025–26 report: fewer than 4 in 10 employees with Copilot access actively use it, and around 64% of licences sit effectively unused — provisioned, paid for, and idle.
That is not a Copilot problem. It is a deployment problem. Most rollouts allocated licences broadly, ran a feature demo, and left adoption to individual initiative. Two years on, the usage report tells you exactly how that went — if anyone runs it.
So run it. Pull the 28-day active usage figures, set them against the licence count, and price the gap at the post-July rate. Then the renewal question has three honest answers.
Answer one: make it deliver
If the data shows pockets of genuine, heavy use — and it almost always does — the case for renewal exists, but only for the workflows where the value is concentrated. The work is to find out why those users get value and the rest do not, then close the gap deliberately: role-specific workflows, not feature tours; licences pointed at the people whose work suits the tool; adoption measured at 30, 60 and 90 days.
This is the right answer for organisations where the diagnosis shows the problem is capability and deployment, not fit. It is also the answer that requires actual work between now and the renewal date, which is why it gets chosen less often than it should.
Answer two: right-size
If the data shows a third of licences doing all the work, the honest move is to renew a third of the licences. Not as a punishment — as a reallocation. Licences move to the roles and teams where the usage data and the workflow analysis say the value is. The savings are real and immediate, and they tend to fund the adoption work that should have happened the first time.
The mistake to avoid here is the blanket cut. Cutting licences by department headcount or seniority feels decisive and is usually wrong — it strips licences from future heavy users and leaves them with people whose workflows never suited the tool. Right-sizing without a diagnosis is just guessing at a lower price.
Answer three: re-evaluate
Sometimes the data says something nobody wants to hear: for this organisation, with these workflows, the tool is not earning and is unlikely to. That is rarer than the vendors suggest and more common than the renewal decks admit. If two years of access, training sessions and reminders have produced 11-minutes-a-day value that nobody can locate — the UK government's own Copilot trial found roughly that — then renewing on autopilot is not optimism, it is inertia.
Re-evaluating does not mean abandoning AI. It usually means the investment belongs somewhere else: in fixing the meeting and communication architecture the AI was papering over, in a smaller targeted licence pool, or in different tooling for specific functions. We have no stake in which answer it is — we are not a Microsoft partner and we do not resell anything — which is precisely what makes the question safe to ask us.
Ask the question before the negotiation
The renewal window is the one moment when this analysis has full commercial leverage. After signature, the same findings are just an interesting report. Before signature, they are negotiating position, budget recovery, and a defensible plan.
If you would rather not run that analysis alone, this is what our Copilot Adoption Diagnostic does: a fixed-fee, two-to-three-week assessment of where your licence spend is and is not earning, with a 90-day plan attached to whichever of the three answers your data supports. We have written more about the wider pattern in why Copilot isn't delivering ROI in Irish organisations.
Renew, right-size or re-evaluate — any of the three can be the right call. Signing without knowing which one you are making is the only wrong one.