Microsoft 365 E7: What the Frontier Suite actually includes and what it costs
Microsoft's first new enterprise tier since 2015 bundles E5, Copilot, Agent 365, and the Entra Suite for $99/user/month from May 2026.
Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 E7, officially branded the Frontier Suite. It is the first new enterprise tier in the Microsoft 365 portfolio since E5 launched a decade ago in 2015. General availability is set for 1 May 2026, at $99 per user per month.
That is a significant moment worth paying attention to, even if you are nowhere near a procurement decision right now.
What is actually in the box
E7 is a bundle of four things you may already be licensing separately, or considering separately:
- Microsoft 365 E5 — the existing top tier, including advanced Defender, Intune, and Purview security capabilities
- Microsoft 365 Copilot — the AI assistant, now powered by what Microsoft calls Work IQ (more on that below)
- Agent 365 — a new control plane for governing AI agents across your organisation
- Microsoft Entra Suite — the full identity and access management suite
If you were to buy E5 plus Copilot and similar advanced add-ons separately, you would be looking at roughly $117 per user per month. E7 brings that to $99, so the bundle saving is around 15%. Not spectacular, but real, and the simplification of a single SKU has its own value when you are managing contracts and renewals at scale.
Agent 365 is also available as a standalone add-on at $15 per user per month for organisations not ready to move to E7.
The part that matters most: Agent 365 and Work IQ
The Copilot piece is familiar territory by now. The more interesting additions are Agent 365 and Work IQ.
Work IQ is Microsoft’s intelligence layer sitting underneath Copilot. It ingests signals from Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive to build a kind of semantic graph of how you work: who you collaborate with, what projects you are involved in, which files are relevant to which conversations. The idea is that Copilot becomes genuinely contextual rather than a generic prompt-response tool. When you ask Copilot something, Work IQ helps it understand what you actually mean given your specific role, relationships, and work patterns. That is the theory, at least, and it explains why Microsoft keeps emphasising that Copilot has an advantage over tools built purely on models and connectors.
Agent 365 is the governance story. As organisations deploy more AI agents, the question of who is running what, where, and with what permissions becomes genuinely complicated. Agent 365 gives IT and security teams a central registry of agents operating in the tenant, visibility into their behaviour, and tools to manage risk. It surfaces in the Microsoft 365 admin centre for IT teams and in Defender and Purview for security teams, rather than requiring a separate interface. The licensing model is per user rather than per agent, which is worth noting: it is about the users creating and managing agents, not a charge per agent spawned.
Microsoft says tens of millions of agents have appeared in the Agent 365 Registry in just two months of availability, and they are watching over 500,000 agents internally through the same system. IDC predicts 1.3 billion agents in circulation by 2028. Whether that number proves accurate or not, the governance question is real and growing.
Copilot Wave 3 and Cowork
Alongside E7, Microsoft announced Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The headline feature here is Copilot Cowork, built in partnership with Anthropic. Cowork is designed for longer-running, multi-step tasks: the kind of work that currently requires you to stay in the loop, moving between applications, chasing information. Cowork breaks a complex request into steps, reasons across tools and files, and executes the task over minutes or hours if needed.
Claude is now available in mainline Copilot Chat (via the Frontier programme), alongside OpenAI models. Microsoft is leaning into a multi-model approach rather than tying Copilot to a single AI provider. For EU and UK tenants, Anthropic features require admin opt-in rather than being on by default.
Wave 3 also brings agentic capabilities directly into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Copilot Chat, and new integrations mean you can interact with Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Power Apps conversationally from within the Microsoft 365 interface.
What this means for your organisation
If you are currently on E5 and have been cautiously watching the Copilot add-on market, E7 gives you a cleaner path to adopt both Copilot and agent governance without assembling multiple SKUs. The 15% saving is a secondary benefit; the primary one is simplicity and the fact that Agent 365 governance is included rather than bolted on.
If you are not on E5, E7 is not the right starting point. The upgrade path involves existing contract terms, and E5 is widely held under multi-year agreements, so this is a medium-term consideration for most organisations rather than something to action immediately.
If you are an IT or security leader, Agent 365 is the piece to focus on regardless of the licensing tier. The proliferation of AI agents in enterprise environments is already happening, with or without a formal governance framework. Having a central registry and the ability to observe agent behaviour from within existing Defender and Purview workflows is a meaningful improvement on the current situation for most organisations.
For Microsoft partners, the changes from April 2026 are also worth noting. E7 and Agent 365 become eligible for CSP core incentives and product accelerators, and Copilot + Power Accelerate programmes now include Agent 365 in immersion briefings, proof-of-concept engagements, and deployment accelerators. Microsoft is also introducing a Frontier Partner Badge for organisations leading AI transformation work.
The bigger picture
Microsoft’s framing around “Frontier Transformation” is their way of describing the next phase of AI adoption: not just individual productivity tools, but AI woven into how entire organisations operate, with appropriate governance in place. E7 is the commercial packaging of that vision.
The Copilot growth numbers Microsoft cites are notable: paid seats grew more than 160% year over year, with daily active usage up ten times. That momentum, combined with the agent proliferation story, is clearly driving the decision to formalise a new top-tier SKU rather than continue layering add-ons onto E5.
Full details are available on the Microsoft 365 Blog and the Microsoft Security Blog. If you want a detailed licensing breakdown, SAMexpert’s guide is a solid reference.