The newly announced E7 license represents the first new tier Microsoft has added to their 365 suite since E5 in 2015. E7 focuses heavily on AI and integrates Copilot into a wide variety of everyday tools such as Word, Excel, and Teams. It also comes with Agent 365, a feature designed to help organizations deploy and manage AI “agents” for various tasks and workflows. MSPs who can confidently offer Copilot will be positioned to benefit most from this shift.
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It’s not every day that Microsoft announces a new licensing tier for their 365 suite. In fact, it’s not even every year. The last new license was E5, which came out all the way back in 2015.
But 2026 is the year of E7, otherwise known as the “Frontier Suite”. It’s a brand-new license for Microsoft 365 that seems geared specifically towards enterprise users, although we can probably expect a significant number of SMBs to follow suit once adoption is normalized.
What does it offer? In a word, AI. Lots of it.
Here’s what the new tier means for MSPs managing multiple tenants.
Microsoft describes E7 as a “human-led, agent-operated system of work”. It’s a platform designed not just to assist employees with AI, but to help them leverage AI agents to take over a wide variety of business-related tasks and workflows. This represents a meaningful architectural shift from anything Microsoft has packaged before.
Initial pricing for the new tier starts at $99 per user per month. Here’s a summary of what it’s building on and what it’s adding.
E7 builds on the full E5 foundation, which has been the most comprehensive Microsoft 365 tier currently available until now. That means every capability already included in E5 is in the box: advanced security, compliance, identity, analytics, and the complete productivity suite.
With E7, Copilot will be embedded directly into the everyday work experience across Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. This is intended to make Copilot available to every user in an organization with the new license, allowing their AI tools to function with context from the full spectrum of the organization’s data.
E7 also includes “Copilot Cowork”: a collaboration with Anthropic that allows Claude to power longer or more complex multi-step tasks.
With E7, the Entra suite extends identity and access controls beyond individual users to cover apps and AI agents as well. It enables conditional access controls, least-privilege governance, and secure access management at an organizational scale that goes further than what standard Entra ID P1 or P2 configurations support.
This is the component that makes E7 genuinely new territory. Agent 365 is a centralized governance, visibility, and control plane for AI agents that will become available when the new tier launches in May 2026.
The idea is straightforward: as organizations deploy AI agents to automate work across the business, those agents need to be managed, secured, and governed the same way users are.
Agent 365 extends Microsoft’s existing infrastructure (including Defender, Entra, Purview) to cover agents as first-class managed entities, providing observability, security, and compliance controls across every agent in the organization.
$99 per user per month is a substantial price point. For context, Microsoft 365 E5 currently sits at $57 per user per month. The gap reflects what Microsoft believes E7 is worth to organizations that want AI to work across the entire business rather than in isolated pilots.
The market signal here is harder to ignore than a feature announcement. Microsoft hasn’t introduced a new licensing tier for over a decade. The fact that they’ve done so now, and centred it almost entirely on AI, tells you something about where they believe enterprise demand is heading.
Early indications are that enterprise appetite for E7 is strong. Organizations that have already invested in Copilot pilots and are looking to move from experimentation to full-scale deployment have an obvious reason to consolidate onto a single governed platform. The promotional offers Microsoft is making available to partners are designed specifically to lower the friction for exactly that transition.
For MSPs, the significance of E7 goes beyond the feature set. It’s a directional signal that AI is expected to be the new defining issue for both enterprise clients seeking IT solutions and SMB clients who follow enterprise adoption patterns.
Enterprise adoption patterns in Microsoft’s ecosystem have historically preceded SMB adoption by one to three years. Business Premium, now the standard recommendation for MSPs working in security-conscious SMB environments, followed exactly this trajectory after E5. As E7 capabilities become normalized at the enterprise level and Microsoft’s partner ecosystem builds practices around them, the pressure on SMBs to adopt will grow.
The MSPs who will be best positioned when that shift happens are the ones who have already built their knowledge and tooling around E7’s core components: Copilot governance, AI agent management, and the identity and compliance controls that underpin them. Building that capability now, while enterprise adoption is driving demand and attention, is meaningfully easier than trying to build it reactively later.
Related: Advancing Microsoft 365: New Capabilities and Pricing Update
For MSPs, E7 creates genuine service opportunities that didn’t exist before. Here’s what competitive MSPs should be positioning themselves to offer in preparation for the launch:
Many organizations interested in E7 will have done some experimentation with Copilot but haven’t fully deployed it. Readiness assessments, data governance preparation, sensitivity label configuration, and structured rollout are all services MSPs can deliver to help tenants become familiar with Copilot before E7 launches.
Agent 365 is the component of E7 with the longest runway for MSP service development. As organizations deploy AI agents to automate more tasks, those agents need ongoing oversight. Who has access to them? What data can they see? What actions can they take? What does the audit trail look like?
These are governance questions that require ongoing attention, not a one-time configuration. For MSPs, that’s the foundation of a long-term managed service: not just deploying agents at the outset, but maintaining the governance framework that keeps them operating securely as the organization’s use of AI evolves.
E7’s E5 foundation means clients moving onto the new tier will have access to a broad set of security and compliance capabilities they may not have had before. Entra, Defender, Purview, and advanced identity controls all require configuration and ongoing management to deliver value.
MSPs that can deliver structured onboarding onto E7’s security stack are in a strong position to expand their managed security offering and deepen client relationships at the same time.
Related: inforcer Named Microsoft Security Excellence Awards Finalist
Copilot is one of the most compelling reasons a tenant would move to E7. But getting Copilot to work responsibly and effectively depends on how each tenant’s data is structured and governed.
Copilot works by reasoning over an organization’s internal Microsoft 365 data and surfacing relevant information to help users with workflows. That’s enormously powerful, but it can also be a security risk if the data Copilot can access hasn’t been properly classified and protected first.
Purview is the Microsoft tool that addresses this. It provides the data classification, sensitivity labelling, and information governance capabilities that makes Copilot safe to run across an organization.
For MSPs, this creates a clear dependency: to unlock the full value of Copilot in E7 within a tenant, Purview needs to be configured properly first. That creates an opportunity for MSPs to offer managed AI services, as long as they have an efficient and scalable way to standardize Purview configurations.
inforcer’s support for Purview lets MSPs manage and standardize Purview configurations across their entire tenant base from a single platform, along with policies for other Microsoft products such as Intune, Defender, and Entra ID.
This allows MSPs using inforcer to build a highly repeatable service around Copilot readiness. Rather than configuring Purview from scratch for every tenant, MSPs can use our platform to offer tenants a complete, managed path to Copilot:
Use the Copilot Readiness Assessment to evaluate each tenant’s current data posture at a glance from a centralized dashboard instead of logging into multiple portals
Standardize Purview configurations by defining proven data governance standards as part of a baseline once and pushing it to every tenant that wants to adopt Copilot
Maintaining those configurations on an ongoing basis as the organization’s data and AI usage evolves
Tenants arrive at Copilot with their data properly classified and protected, and the MSP has a central view of what’s been configured across every environment they manage.
Microsoft doesn’t launch new licensing tiers lightly. E7 represents a clear statement of where they believe the market is going: AI embedded in every workflow, governed at the infrastructure level, and operationalized across the entire organization rather than in isolated pockets.
For MSPs, the question isn’t whether E7 is going to matter to their clients. It’s whether they’re positioned to lead the conversation when it does, or whether they’ll be reacting to it after the fact.
The MSPs that win with E7 will be the ones who can move clients from AI experimentation to AI execution, manage the governance and security requirements that come with it, and do all of that consistently across every tenant they manage. The right multi-tenant management platform makes that more than possible; it makes it simple and scalable.
Book a demo to see how inforcer helps MSPs operationalize Microsoft 365 E7 and manage AI governance across their entire client base.