BUILT BY SEGMENTUM · COWORK COST GUIDE
What Copilot Cowork costs a wholesale business
For a typical wholesaler with 30 desk staff - office, sales and account management, data and buying - Copilot Cowork comes to roughly £4,320 a month all in: about £144 per desk person, with the warehouse adding nothing, because per-person licensing follows desks, not headcount.
What the everyday tasks cost
Supplier comparison and negotiation brief - 700-1,500 credits - £5.53 to £11.85 per run
Customer price list update pack - 400-800 credits - £3.16 to £6.32
Monthly sales and stock report from exports - 300-700 credits - £2.37 to £5.53
Customer communications batch - 100-300 credits - £0.79 to £2.37
A buyer preparing two supplier negotiations a month spends £11 to £24 on briefs that used to mean an afternoon each in spreadsheets and old emails.
Your team
Starting numbers match the example on this page - change them to fit your business.
Your estimate
Uses Microsoft's default usage mix and list pricing ($0.01 per Copilot Credit, billed in US dollars), ex-VAT. Licences assume Microsoft 365 Business Standard plus a Copilot licence per person at list price. For the full step-by-step version, use the calculator on the home page. Pricing last verified 12 October 2026.
Where the usage actually goes
Wholesale margins are made in two places Cowork can actually reach: buying and pricing. The supplier negotiation brief - terms history, price movements, alternatives - is the heavy task with the most direct money attached. Price list updates and the monthly reporting cycle carry the middle; the daily flow of customer emails is high-volume, light-tier, and nearly free.
The honest sizing question is the same as logistics and manufacturing: this is a desks business at the licence level. Thirty desks in an operation of sixty or eighty people is the whole cost base - and within those desks, the buyers, account managers and reporting staff justify licences long before general admin does.
The boundary: stock, orders and pricing live in your ERP, and Cowork can't see them without connectors. It works on the exports, the spreadsheets, the correspondence - which is where the analysis and the negotiation prep happen anyway, but the system of record stays untouched.
Common questions
Does it connect to our ERP or stock system?
Not out of the box. Exports in SharePoint or OneDrive, yes; live ERP data needs connectors where they exist. Budget on the document layer around your systems.
Where does a wholesaler see value first?
Supplier negotiation briefs and the monthly reporting cycle - the assembly work between the ERP export and the decision.
Do warehouse staff need licences?
No - the same rule as every operational sector: licence desks, not headcount. The warehouse adds zero to this bill.
Can it update our price lists automatically?
It can draft the update pack from your sheets and margin rules - but pricing goes out under a person's judgement. Draft, check, send.
BEFORE YOU COMMIT
That's the cost. The harder question is whether it's the answer.
A new tool sitting on top of an estate that nobody fully understands usually adds cost, not clarity. So before you commit the budget, it's worth asking a simpler question: is Cowork actually your constraint, or is it something underneath it? We help established UK businesses get a clear view of what they're running - and whether the next bit of spend earns its place.
Pricing and defaults last verified
12 October 2026
against Microsoft's published documentation.
Figures use Microsoft list pricing ($0.01 per Copilot Credit, billed in US dollars) converted at roughly £1 = $1.27, ex-VAT. Usage defaults come from Microsoft's Cowork Frontier programme data. This is a budgeting aid, not a quote - confirm current pricing with Microsoft. This is an independent tool built by Segmentum and is not produced or endorsed by Microsoft. "Microsoft 365", "Copilot" and "Cowork" are trademarks of Microsoft, used for identification only.