Microsoft has revealed that nearly 60% of its customer service customers are already purchasing usage-based credits.
Disclosed by CEO Satya Nadella during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call, the figure confirms something that has been building in the background since late 2025.
The shift from per-seat to consumption-based AI pricing in the contact center has been well documented, but has perhaps sometimes seemed more like a roadmap to a future model than the reality for current organizations.
Microsoft’s results, however, reveal that it is now the majority purchasing behavior among its customer service base.
“The customer service category is at the forefront of this transformation,” Nadella said, pointing to growing demand for usage-based credits across the business applications portfolio.
As a proof point, he cited HSBC, which is using prebuilt agents within Dynamics 365 to manage customer inquiries across products, markets, and regulatory requirements, reducing resolution time by over 30% in the process.
Arguably, that data point carries weight beyond Microsoft’s own results. If the company with one of the broadest enterprise footprints in CX is seeing a majority of its service customers move to consumption-based purchasing, it suggests a structural shift in how contact center AI is being bought and budgeted more broadly.
How the Pricing Model Got Here
Microsoft’s pricing evolution has been a gradual build over the past 18 months.
When Dynamics 365 Contact Center launched in July 2024, the offering was primarily seat-based. The consumption layer came later.
In October 2025, Microsoft introduced Copilot Credits as the mechanism for accessing its first-party AI agents, bundling 1,000 credits per user per month into Premium SKUs, including Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium.
Shortly after, it added a Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan: a one-year, pay-up-front option with tiered discounts for organizations ready to scale.
A pay-as-you-go option also exists, billed through Azure at $0.01 per message with no upfront commitment.
The result is a pricing architecture that increasingly resembles Azure itself: a base entitlement, pre-purchase tiers for those who want predictability, and a metered layer for overage or experimentation.
On the earnings call, Nadella was explicit that this is the direction of travel across the whole portfolio:
“The basic transformation of any per-user business of ours – whether it is productivity, coding, or security – will become a per-user and usage business.”
CFO Amy Hood put it in terms that budget-conscious CX leaders will recognize:
“It will still have that per-seat license logic, but it will also have a meter, just like you see in Azure.”
The ROI Argument
For CX leaders now operating in this model, the central question becomes: when agents are resolving more inquiries and running longer automated workflows, those meters spin faster; so what justifies the cost?
Nadella addressed this on the call:
“Where are these dollars going to come from? At the end of the day, they will come from some eval and outcome that a business has where these agents – working on behalf of users or with users – have created value.
“Some cost is either decreasing because of the use of agents, or some revenue is increasing because agents compressed workflows.”
The HSBC example is the clearest illustration of that logic in action, where a measurable operational outcome becomes the justification for the consumption spend.
Whether that equation holds at scale across different industries and use cases is the question CX leaders will be pressure-testing in the months ahead.
Nadella also addressed the predictability concern during the Q&A portion of the call.
“Customers want predictability for budgets and procurement, and the seat-based pricing is just entitlement to some consumption,” he said.
“There are some base usage rights that get bundled in or packaged into seats. It is a convenient way for people to buy consumption packs.”
Beyond a certain threshold, overages move to pure consumption, though long-term commitments come with appropriate discounting.
In some ways, it is a model that mirrors what Salesforce has been building with Agentforce’s own pricing evolution, suggesting the market is converging on this hybrid approach regardless of vendor.
The seat is becoming a floor, not a ceiling, and based on Microsoft’s Q3 numbers, a growing majority of CX customers are already operating above it.
