A global banking group entered an EA renewal cycle with a proposed Microsoft 365 E5 step-up, a top-down Copilot commitment, and Azure pricing that no longer reflected the bank's actual consumption. Sixteen weeks later, the renewal landed at $9.6M below the opening proposal, with Copilot structured as an opt-in carve-out rather than a built-in commitment.
The bank's existing Enterprise Agreement was three years old and bundled Microsoft 365 E3, a small Power Platform footprint and an Azure commitment that had been sized against a now-obsolete migration plan. Internal demand for Copilot was real but uneven, sitting at a handful of pilot teams.
Microsoft's proposal moved the full base to M365 E5, attached a fleet-wide Copilot commitment at preferred pricing, and rolled the under-consumed Azure commitment forward at a 9% uplift. The headline number was framed as growth-on-growth.
The Copilot baseline was being treated as a discount unlock for E5. Once committed, the floor would have been hard to reset on the next renewal, regardless of actual adoption.
We pulled real seat utilisation across the M365 stack and segmented the workforce into E3, E5 and lower-spec personas. The output: a defensible target mix that did not assume full-fleet E5.
Designed a carve-out: agreed Copilot pricing locked at the EA level, but opt-in by business unit on a quarterly cadence, with no minimum commitment for years two and three.
The under-consumed commitment was rebuilt against an honest 36-month forecast tied to the core-banking modernisation milestones, with a Savings Plan layer for predictable workloads.
Worked with the bank's CISO to keep Defender and Purview where they made sense, without using them as a justification for fleet-wide E5.
We drafted the position paper. The bank's procurement lead presented it. Our team ran the support sessions across the four follow-up rounds.
The opening Microsoft proposal usually bundles AI adoption into the discount mechanic. Separate the AI question from the EA question. They negotiate better apart than together.
The renewed EA moved approximately one-third of the fleet to E5 against a justified persona model, held two-thirds on E3, and locked Copilot at a pre-agreed unit price available on quarterly opt-in. Azure was restructured against forecast with a Savings Plan layer.
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