Chapters and their answers
Question 1 of 5 · What do we already own?
You pay for 8,742 Microsoft seats across 6 subscriptions — 632 were never given to anyone.
counted from Contoso's illustrative records · seats, never people
The move
Hand out the spares you already own before anyone buys more.
Bought — the seats you are billed for.
Never given to anyone — bought minus assigned: fully paid, still on the shelf.
§6 · Methodology
Where every number on these pages comes from.
Plain words, no marketing. A figure that is counted says counted; a figure that rests on an assumption says so and names the assumption; a figure Aristo cannot reach is shown as a dash with the exact permission that would fill it in.
Every number on these five pages, sourced
the estate · waiting for a user · the money · teams · renewal · recommendations
The estate — read once from your Microsoft subscription list (Organization.Read.All, read-only). Bought = seats you pay for. Assigned = seats handed to a person. Unassigned = bought minus assigned. These are procurement totals, so they are seats and never people.
Waiting for a user — two different seats, added together on purpose. A seat ready to activate is assigned, with no activity recorded in Microsoft's Copilot usage report in the last 14 days. An unassigned seat is paid for and ready for its first owner. Both are fully paid and waiting for a user, so both are money you can point somewhere else.
The money — Seat price is Microsoft’s published price of $30 per Copilot seat, assumed as your Copilot seat price until you set your own — nobody has set your real one yet, so every dollar on this page is labeled assumption An assumed figure, used until your own replaces it. and will sharpen the moment your real price is entered. Licenses waiting for a user $/month = seats waiting for a user × that seat price. There is no per-SKU price in this product, so seats waiting for a user on subscriptions other than Copilot are reported as seats and are never turned into dollars.
Teams — every department line clears the five-person floor. A team of fewer than five people is shown together with other teams, never on its own, and a figure about fewer than five people is said in words, not as a number. Every seat still counts in every total. No page of this report can name a person.
The renewal countdown — computed fresh on every read from the renewal date your team provided. Microsoft's subscription list exposes no renewal date, so Aristo never invents one; an unset date leaves the counter blank. The only forward expiry signal Microsoft does expose is the post-lapse grace window, and that is counted.
Recommendations — the seats ready to reroute after review and the annual figure beside them are a recommendation, deliberately conservative and explicitly an upper bound, because the rescue-resistant and surveyed signals can overlap. That figure is Effective Entitlement at work: spend rerouted to fund the next activation wave, never a downgrade. Verify each reassignment before a seat moves. Nothing in this report cancels a license on your behalf.
The traffic light on Question 2 is the same light, from the same engine, as the one on your consumption console — lifted here, never recomputed, so the two surfaces can never show a leader different colors for the same money.
▸ Take this into the meeting (PPTX)
One slide per question, the claim as the headline — the same numbers as this page, never re-typed.
The rest of this story: the Frontier Firm Report → turns the seats back on, and the Value Report → says what came back. · Connect your organization →