Getting Started with the Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]This is a great option for organizations that want to build a Microsoft agent that spans across M365, business processes, orchestration, or pro code workloads that require multiple products.

[00:00:12]>> [music] [singing] >> Welcome back to the Azure Central show.

[00:00:19]I'm your host, Thomas. Organizations of every size are investing heavily in AI agents to automate workflows and boost productivity. But as AI agent development scales, so does the complexity of managing costs. If you are a team developing cross multiple tools, budgeting can be unpredictable. To help understand how Microsoft is helping to simplify this process, I'm joined once again by Kyle from Microsoft Azure marketing. Welcome back to the show, Kyle.

[00:00:49]>> Thanks for having me, Thomas. Excited to be here to talk talk about the Microsoft agent pre-purchase plan.

[00:00:55]>> So, let us get right into it. What exactly is the Microsoft agent pre-purchase plan and why is it an important development now?

[00:01:04]>> It's a great question. So, well, we know that time and resources that companies are spending to you know, develop and build these AI agents, if developing across different platforms, it could be hard to set a reliable budget. Microsoft agent pre-purchase plan is a unified commitment offer that covers Copilot Studio, Microsoft Boundary, and we just recently added Microsoft Fabric as well as GitHub Copilot. And so, instead of buying separate credits or licenses for these different platforms, you're just buying an agent commit units or ECUs. And ECUs are a pool of flexible funds that you can spend across these platforms. And so, as you utilize these services, it will dip into those that pool of funds for you.

[00:01:43]>> This sounds great. So, it's one plan regardless of what platform you're building.

[00:01:48]>> Exactly. If your agent needs to call search service or reasoning model, that's all coming from the same pool. Um this is a great option for organizations that want to build a Microsoft Azure that spans across M365 business processes, orchestration, or pro-code workloads that require multiple products.

[00:02:05]>> Okay, this is this is very interesting.

[00:02:07]Um, so what are the safe things when you commit up front?

[00:02:11]>> Yes, so right now we offer three tiers of different ACUs that you can purchase.

[00:02:16]So the first tier is $19,000 and you can save 5% versus pay-as-you-go. Second tier is $90,000 and you can save up to 10% versus pay-as-you-go. And the final tier is $425,000 and you can save up to 15% versus pay-as-you-go. Again, those what you committed to is going to cover all four of these different platforms.

[00:02:35]>> Fantastic. So, let's see how it works in practice. Can you show us how a customer would actually find and purchase P3 for example?

[00:02:45]>> Yes, Thomas. Let's go into the Azure portal and I can we can demo how you can find the Microsoft Azure pre-purchase plan.

[00:02:52]So, what you're going to do is type in reservations in the search bar.

[00:02:55]If you pre-P3 offer actually falls under the reservation blade. Reservations, this is where you're going to also see what services are covered by what compute services are covered by reservations, what database services are covered. So, P3 is also blocked into here.

[00:03:11]And so when you click add, you can see again all the services that are listed covered by the reservations. The Microsoft Azure pre-purchase plan is going to be found at the bottom left.

[00:03:23]And once you get to the purchasing blade, you're going to choose the billing subscription that you want the plan to be applied to.

[00:03:30]And then the next step that you want to do is you're going to have to choose the scope that you want this to be applied to. This is really important because you can choose if you want the plan to be applied across your entire account, different management group, single subscription, single resource group.

[00:03:46]This is important because it's going to help make sure that your P3 gets utilized and it gives you visibility into you know what business unit, what part of the team is going to be uh receiving the seeing the savings plan sorry, the P3 discounts.

[00:04:02]Next you're going to see the list of tiers that I mentioned before. So we have these three tiers that you can purchase all up front.

[00:04:08]And ACUs that are that are associated with it. We have the 20,000 ACUs, the 100,000 ACUs and the 500,000 ACUs.

[00:04:17]This is important to know that you don't have to start at the 500,000 ACUs. You can start at 20,000 ACUs. You can always add on.

[00:04:25]And as of right now, there's only a one-year commitment with the with each tier.

[00:04:31]And then we select on the tier that you want. You're going to see the estimated savings. So in this case 5% and the total cost, which is 19,000.

[00:04:40]So in this demo, we're going to choose the tier one. You click add to cart.

[00:04:44]And it's going to start populating and we can click view cart.

[00:04:48]In the view cart, you have the ability to rename this P3 order. It will recap how many ACUs you're purchasing, the total commitment, which is one year. If you want to renew auto renew, the shared scope or the scope that you apply applying it to, the unit price and the estimated savings.

[00:05:07]So again, just to recap this is everything that's going to be in the cart when you make that selection.

[00:05:13]And then finally, you can go to the next review and buy one final time to review your purchase selection. It has some important bullet points and information that you want to look at as well regarding the P3. And then you are able to confirm the purchase by clicking buy now.

[00:05:31]And it's going to take a few seconds to populate, but then I'll get your confirmation page is saying that the P3 has been purchased. And then once it's purchased, it's going to start applying to your environment automatically.

[00:05:42]>> Okay.

[00:05:44]Fantastic. So thank you very much for the walk through, Kyle. Now, my next question would be how can a customer see where their P3 was applied within the portal and track the consumption?

[00:05:57]>> Another great question. This is really important because after you make the purchase, you want to make sure that you're utilizing it, actually getting the savings discounts.

[00:06:05]And so, what you want to do is in the Azure portal, you can type in reservations again. It's going to show you all the P3s that you've purchased.

[00:06:13]Um here you can see the one that we just purchased, the 20,000 ECUs. Um it's going to Again, it's going to recap expiration date, the share uh the scope, and then you can also see on the right uh the utilization. How much of those 20,000 ECUs are you currently using um in your environment?

[00:06:29]Um and so, you can see on the right, you have about 39% of it's being utilized.

[00:06:35]And so, that's super important cuz you want to track that. And then to get a deeper dive look into that, you click on the actual P3 offer.

[00:06:42]Uh up top, again, you can see the summary, reservation ID, expiration date.

[00:06:47]Um but then down below, you're going to see the graph that really breaks down um how much of your P3's being utilized.

[00:06:53]You can see it by the percentage level.

[00:06:56]How much of that 20,000 is being broken uh being utilized on a percent level, but also you have the ability to break it down by the actual unit. So, how much of the quantity is being consumed?

[00:07:05]Um so, you have different views telling the same story.

[00:07:09]Um and so, you can see that we're using around 8,000 of the um ECUs that we purchased, and we have about 12,000 remaining.

[00:07:17]Uh we also have the ability to change the look back period. So, say you want to look at how much of my P3 I'm using uh the past 3 months versus 7 days to kind of get that uh historical view of it.

[00:07:28]And then, we also have the ability to um once you have the settings that you want to choose, you can also choose if you want to download the CSV. So, you can take this file and bring it to your team members, to your leadership to see how the utilization is breaking down, and making sure that you're getting close to that 100% um before the one-year commitment's over.

[00:07:47]What's also really important is that as we mentioned that the P3 covers different platforms, different services.

[00:07:53]So, with this report you have the ability to see, you know, what specific products and services are consuming your different commit units. And so, you can see what's covered what's being consumed by GitHub, what's being consumed by Fabric your Microsoft Fabric capacity units, AI search, your Microsoft Azure resources. So, this is a good detailed view in the table so you know, oh, I know how much my 20,000 units are being consumed by GitHub. It's really important to have that visibility to see, you know, what teams, what applications are using the the P3 commit units. So, very important tool. We have a lot of documentation on this, but this is a great way to really track utilization with through the one-year commitment of your P3 offer.

[00:08:38]>> Yeah, this is really a fantastic way of seeing what you actually spend on, right? This is super helpful. So, any tips for organizations who just get started with P3?

[00:08:49]>> Just a few things.

[00:08:51]You can always start with the lower tier and scale up and buy more P3s. You don't want to over commit.

[00:08:57]You can combine P3 with a Microsoft Azure blueprint to accelerate your development.

[00:09:01]Use cost allocation tags to make it easy to charge back and make it simpler to see, you know, what's being utilized by what business unit.

[00:09:09]And again, leverage the cost management tool that we just showed as a utilization report so you can see make make sure that you're fully using utilizing your commitments that you purchased with the P3 offer.

[00:09:22]>> Fantastic. So, where should our viewers go if they either want to learn more or directly want to get started?

[00:09:28]>> If you want to learn more about building agents, we have a lot of documentation on the Microsoft learn page. It has guidance and best best practices for you to follow.

[00:09:37]For a deeper look into Microsoft Agent Factory and the Microsoft Agent P3 offer, we have um, some blogs within the tech community that we will also publish with this video.

[00:09:46]>> Kyle, thanks so much for walking us through this. I think a lot of organizations are going to appreciate how how to have one simple way to budget for a agent development across platforms.

[00:09:58]>> Great. Thanks for having me, Thomas.

[00:10:00]>> As always, you can find the links to the resources we discussed today in the episode description below. Don't forget to leave your feedback or questions for Kyle in the comment section, and be sure to give our show a like and subscribe to the channel to get notified when a new episode drops. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on the Azure Essentials show.

[00:10:22]>> [music]