How much do your agents cost? Users cant tell.

The conversation many of us in the legal industry have been having about tools like Copilot Cowork, especially as we get into the 2027 budget planning season, is about how to budget for AI token usage.

Obviously, there may be some interest in using these tools, but one thing that many of us with access to the Copilot Admin tools might not realize, and which I hadn’t thought much about, was shared in this LinkedIn post by Mahmoud Hassan:

While the Microsoft 365 admin center dashboard provides a centralized view of spending patterns, helping administrators identify where credits are used, who consumes them, and how usage trends evolve over time.
End-users are kept in the dark, while many enterprises now implement group or user levels limit for Cowork.

This is a legitimate issue; end-users can’t see how much they are spending on tokens across sessions. They may have no idea that they have used up all of the team’s allocated tokens. This creates an interesting opportunity to gamify token spend in a much more effective way than just listing out who used the most.

We can publicly measure the cost of someone using AI against the output of their work. If the user can’t tell the total cost of their AI work, we can create a dashboard of costs and let the workforce judge themselves openly. Since users can’t tell themselves how much compute they’re using, we make it public and make them prove the value.

It’s not great that Microsoft makes it this difficult to see how much you’re using as an individual, but as an Admin, this can be used to our advantage.

How do you let people know how much they are spending on Copilot tokens?

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