Chapters and their answers
2,068 Premium seats are working in the apps; 692 only chat — Basic covers them — and 1,280 show no signal yet.
Question 2 · What is waiting for a user — and where?
How we counted this
what proves a Premium seat · the two kinds of waiting seat · how a team row is counted
Seats ready to activate come from Microsoft’s own Copilot usage report — a seat with no genuine activity in the last 14 days, not merely a signed-in session. Shelf seats come from the subscription list. The traffic light is lifted, unchanged, from the same engine that runs your consumption console. The cap itself lives in your Microsoft spending policy; Policy Truth names the policy that decides.
What proves a Premium seat is needed. Microsoft now describes three levels: Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot Basic — standard in-app access with no add-on — and Premium, the paid add-on that adds automatic grounding in your own content, priority access and the advanced controls. So activity alone no longer answers the question; activity in the apps where that grounding is the point does. Each paid seat is classed once, in order, over the report's own 30-day window.
Why one class has no number. Microsoft’s usage reports API returns usage only for people who hold a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and says plainly that unlicensed Copilot Chat usage is not available through it. Aristo will not invent a figure it cannot source, so that class carries its state and the page that holds the real number in your own admin center.
What a leader sees, and what they never see. The per-person rows of the usage report are read, classed and discarded in one pass; only these counts are kept, and a team line appears only above the five-person floor. The one person who is ever shown a single seat's class is that person, on their own page.
Ready to activate — $38,400 a month. These assigned seats are ready to activate; the usage report has no activity for them in the last 14 days. An activation push is the first move.
Unassigned — $4,800 a month. Bought and paid for, unassigned. Nobody has to give anything up for these — they can go straight to the people already asking.
Working seats and seats ready to activate are counted per team — Microsoft's own Copilot usage report joined to your directory, aggregated to team totals. No row here is derived by dividing an org number.
So what: $43,200 a month sits across 1,440 paid Copilot seats that are ready to go to work. The villain here is the missing view, not your people. These are seats ready to activate or unassigned, and the teams below are where the next warm introduction lands.
You can now decide: which teams get the next activation push, and which shelf seats can be handed out this week without anyone giving anything up.
See who the paid seat is for, and the seats waiting for a user team by team
effective entitlement · seats ready to activate · shelf seats · the light
Microsoft’s Copilot usage reports API returns usage only for people who hold a Microsoft 365 Copilot license; unlicensed Copilot Chat usage is not available through it. That is why the fourth class is a state rather than a number. Microsoft Learn →
Basic-covered seats go to the waitlist first — chapter 3 →
Teams are named by directory headcount; small figures are shown in words.