What it does

Covers the mechanics of getting Copilot into users' hands: buying the add-on, assigning licences, and confirming the apps light up.

Key facts

• Assign licences the usual ways — individually in the admin center, via groups (group-based licensing through Entra), or with PowerShell for scale.
• Group-based licensing is the sane choice for anything beyond a pilot; membership changes then drive assignment automatically.
• Users need the qualifying base licence and the Copilot add-on. A missing base plan silently blocks Copilot even with the add-on assigned.
• Copilot surfaces appear across Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Microsoft 365 app once licensed and signed in.
• Roll-out to app UIs isn't instant; allow time for provisioning to propagate.

When to use / skip

Group-based licensing for real deployments. Direct assignment only for tiny pilots or one-off exceptions. Don't hand-assign hundreds of users — you'll lose track of who has what.

Configuration decisions

• Group strategy: one Copilot group, or cohorts phased over weeks.
• Whether to gate assignment behind a readiness check (training completed, oversharing sorted).

Gotchas

• Base-plan mismatch is the classic support ticket: add-on assigned, Copilot still absent, because the user lacks the qualifying base.
• Nested or dynamic groups can produce licence-assignment errors that aren't obvious until you check the group's licensing status.

Consultant notes

• Wire licence assignment to a readiness gate, not a spreadsheet — users who get Copilot before they're briefed churn on it fast.
• Phase cohorts so support and champions can keep pace; a big-bang assignment overwhelms the help desk.
• Reclaim licences from inactive users through the usage data; unused add-ons are pure waste.
• Confirm the base-plan dependency in the tenant before you promise go-live dates.

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Recheck when group-based licensing or the setup flow changes in the admin center.