Microsoft ends bundled AI Builder credits: check your renewals

Microsoft stopped bundling AI Builder credits with new and renewed Power Platform licences on 1 November. Any Power Automate flow that reads invoices or runs an AI prompt now needs separately purchased capacity once the current contract term ends. The change is easy to miss because many organisations never bought AI Builder as a line item, so nothing on an invoice points to the flows at risk.

What changed on 1 November

Microsoft began the wind-down in October 2025, and the final date has now passed. Its admin notice, published on 26 October, says eligible Power Platform and Dynamics 365 licences bought or renewed on or after 1 November no longer include seeded AI Builder credits. AI Builder capacity add-ons reached end of life on the same date. The AI features remain supported and run on Copilot Credits instead, with no automatic conversion between the two currencies.

Existing entitlements last until the contract term ends, so each organisation's deadline is its own renewal date. Microsoft's documentation isn't fully consistent on the point. Its credit management page still describes seeded credits being removed on 1 November, while the admin notice and the end-of-credits page honour them through the term. We've followed the notice as the most recent statement, but a licensing partner should confirm how the rule applies to your contract.

Why a renewal can stop a working process

Seeded credits were generous enough to run small production workloads unnoticed. Microsoft lists 5,000 credits for each Power Automate Premium licence, 500 for Power Apps Premium and 20,000 for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, and those credits sit in a shared tenant pool. WindowsForum's analysis of the partner notice points out that customers relying on seeded credits alone have no add-on to raise a flag, so their allowance can simply stop refilling at renewal.

When AI Builder credits run out, the flow tries Copilot Credits. When neither is available, AI Builder runs are blocked, and actions fail with errors such as QuotaExceeded. Microsoft's consumption calculation can lag by five days or more, so a flow can keep running after the allowance has gone and then fail without warning. Usage resets on the first of each month and unused credits don't carry over. Month-end is the exposed period for accounts payable flows, because invoice volumes tend to peak just as the allowance runs lowest.

Environment settings add a second trap. An environment with its own allocation won't switch to the tenant pool when the allocation runs out. If licences renew on different dates, we'd also expect the pool to shrink in steps, which could hide the shortfall until a busy month exposes it.

What the new rates do to cost

The price effect depends on the workload. Microsoft's capability rate table puts invoice and receipt analysis at 8 Copilot Credits a page, or US$0.08 at the pay-as-you-go rate, against US$0.016 on a prepaid add-on. That's a fivefold rise for add-on customers. Custom document processing moves from US$0.05 to US$0.08 a page. Plain text recognition gets cheaper, falling from US$0.0015 to US$0.001 a page.

Microsoft's New Zealand site lists the Copilot Studio pack at NZ$323.60 a month. A pack contains 25,000 credits, which by our arithmetic covers 3,125 invoice pages at about 10 cents a page. Unused credits don't roll over, so a pack only pays if the volume is there. Using Microsoft's US dollar figures, a US$200 pack costs the same as 20,000 pay-as-you-go credits, or 2,500 invoice pages. Below that monthly volume, pay-as-you-go is likely to be cheaper.

Seeded customers feel the change differently, because the credits came with the licence. Ten Power Automate Premium licences provided 50,000 credits a month, enough for about 1,560 invoice pages. The same volume now takes 12,500 Copilot Credits, or about US$125 a month at the pay-as-you-go rate. The amount won't trouble most businesses, but it's a new cost with no budget owner.

What it means for NZ businesses

Flows with no AI step aren't touched. Microsoft states that Power Automate cloud flows use Power Automate licensing, so the exposure sits with flows containing AI Builder document models or prompts. A small firm with a single invoice flow faces a modest bill and an afternoon's admin. The harder case is an organisation that built a high-volume document process on add-on pricing, where a fivefold rate change reopens the original build decision.

Azure AI Document Intelligence is the obvious alternative for those volumes. Easy Insight's October comparison put the prebuilt invoice model at under a penny a page in Azure's UK South region, against roughly 5p through a UK Copilot Studio pack. The saving comes with an integration to build and support, so it needs real volume to justify itself, and you should price it for your own Azure region.

Moving flows to Copilot Studio won't help with this. Once a classic flow becomes an agent flow, its AI actions can only consume Copilot Credits, so any remaining AI Builder allowance stops applying to that flow.

The review is also a useful prompt to ask whether each AI step still earns its cost. Our process and automation page covers how we approach that kind of review.

Next steps

• Run the AI Builder consumption report in the Power Platform admin centre this week. The report covers a rolling 30 days by date, user and environment, so a report run now will capture October's month-end.
• Trace the credit use back to individual flows through AI Builder Activity or the Dataverse AI Event table, then give each flow a named business owner.
• List every licence renewal date and ask your licensing partner how the rule applies to monthly-term subscriptions. Our reading is that a monthly renewal could count as "renewed", but we haven't found Microsoft confirmation either way.
• Turn off auto-renew for AI Builder add-ons in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, or ask your partner to do so if a reseller manages the subscription.
• Estimate Copilot Credits for each workload from the rate table, sizing for your busiest month, and assign capacity before current entitlements expire.
• Decide how each critical environment should behave when credits run out. Pay-as-you-go is one of Microsoft's listed options and bills usage to Azure at month-end, which keeps flows running but needs someone watching the Azure bill.