A new Billing Type column is added in the Copilot and Agent Capabilities page. This indicates whether consumption is billed by Microsoft, custom-billed by a partner, or not consumption-billed. A capability can be billed by Microsoft either if it's delivered by Microsoft, or if the partner building the capability has chosen to opt in to using Business Central AI resources. Learn more in Business Central AI resources.

The following example shows billing types for various capabilities. Note that the individual billing type for the example capabilities is subject to change in the future.

Example of billing type for various Copilot and agent capabilities

The billing information is set up manually by the app developer—it's not automatically inferred at runtime. Therefore, it's up to the developer to ensure that the correct billing type is set in the app and also corresponds to what actually happens. The billing type can be set in the RegisterCapability() and ModifyCapability() procedures.

At runtime, the billing type setting is validated against which Azure OpenAI resources the capability actually tries to use. Partners will likely use their own Azure OpenAI subscription during development, testing, and troubleshooting, but might opt in to use Business Central AI resources in customer production environments. Therefore, there may be some inconsistency in the defined billing type for the app versus the actual API call to Azure OpenAI in sandboxes.

The following table summarizes the supported combinations. If the combination isn't allowed, the user gets an error message that usage of AI resources isn't authorized with the chosen billing type.

Supported uses of billing type versus which Azure OpenAI resources are used in the code

Learn more on managing consumption-based billing.