Microsoft Copilot for M365 costs $30/user/month. Most companies buy seats for everyone in the organization and never check who actually uses them.
How Much Copilot Waste Is Typical?
In one analysis, a company with 200 Copilot seats had 67 active users. 133 unused seats at $30/month = $47,880 per year in pure waste. Nobody in IT knew because the licenses were bundled into the enterprise agreement.
Why Does Copilot Seat Waste Happen?
Three reasons:
- Bulk purchasing — IT buys for the whole org during rollout, never right-sizes after adoption plateaus
- No usage tracking — Microsoft's admin portal shows license assignment, not actual usage frequency
- Adoption failure — employees don't know what Copilot does, weren't trained, and never opened it after week one
How Do You Fix Copilot Seat Waste?
Pull the admin export. Check active users in the last 30 days vs. total licensed seats. Anyone who hasn't used Copilot in 30 days doesn't need a seat. Right-size to active users plus a 20% buffer for growth. That's the fix — and it typically recovers 40-60% of the annual Copilot spend.
Every Coriven Proof audit checks this automatically. It's usually the single biggest finding.