Run a 15-Minute Agent Inventory Before the Next Invoice

The bill arrives before the pilot is remembered

A trial agent can run, get forgotten, and still appear on the next invoice. GitHub Copilot harness agents and workflows began consuming Copilot Credits on September 1, 2026. Starting September 1, 2026, existing Copilot Studio agents and workflows that use the GitHub Copilot harness lose their grace period and move to usage-based Copilot Credits billing. The September 1, 2026 billing change covers GitHub Copilot harness agents and workflows that were created before August 3, 2026, including Dev or Trial environments. The free period for the new GitHub Copilot harness ended on September 1, 2026, and reached back to work already completed. Standard harness agents and Copilot Chat harness agents are not part of the September 1, 2026 credit billing change.

The inventory is the control

Agent cost control works best as a standing task, not a reaction to a surprise line. A utility account has an owner, a budget, a ceiling, and a review date. An AI agent needs the same four things.

Copilot Credits can be prepaid at about $200 per month for 25,000 credits, or paid per use through an Azure subscription at $0.01 per credit. That price point makes a ceiling useful. Without one, a small workflow can run past the budget before anyone notices.

In the Power Platform admin center, an administrator can set a monthly consumption ceiling for each agent, add a usage notification, and enable a hard stop that disables the agent at the limit. The hard stop is the difference between a warning and a control.

Copilot Studio's April 2026 updates show each agent's security and protection status to administrators in the authoring experience. The Analytics Viewer role lets analysts review agent insights without holding administration rights. The expanded agent usage estimator projects Copilot credit use across Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 in one view. Agent 365 gives IT administrators a back-end dashboard for managing AI agents across the Microsoft AI ecosystem.

The checklist is the minimum control

Run the inventory before the invoice, not after. The name and environment identify what you are paying for, and the decision column forces a choice. The fields below turn a forgotten pilot into a managed account.

• Agent name and workflow: record every agent, including test and trial versions.
• Environment: record where it runs.
• Owner: name one person responsible for the agent's behavior.
• Invoice owner: name one person who will reconcile the bill.
• Expected monthly credits: write the number you expect to use.
• Ceiling: set the maximum monthly consumption.
• Notification threshold: choose the point where a warning fires.
• Hard stop: confirm the agent disables itself at the ceiling.
• Last used date: note when the agent last did real work.
• Decision: mark keep, archive, or disable.

Separate owner and invoice owner: the builder should not be the only person answering for the bill. Expected credits and ceiling make usage defensible. The notification threshold gives you time to act before the hard stop. The last used date is the cleanup trigger: if the agent has not done real work, archive it.

The review belongs in the monthly close

Put the inventory in the same meeting where the team reviews burn rate. The invoice owner brings the sheet, the agent owner answers for one row, and the team makes a keep, archive, or disable decision. The meeting should be short enough that a forgotten pilot gets archived quickly.

The document should be boring. It needs a date, a row for each agent, and a note about why the ceiling is set where it is. If a ceiling is raised, the note should say what changed: a new workflow, more users, or a seasonal spike. If a ceiling is lowered, the note should say what stopped working.

Give the review a fixed owner, not a rotating volunteer. The invoice owner should be able to say which agent is missing, which ceiling is unset, and which row has no last used date. If the answer is unclear, the inventory is not finished.

Keep the document in the same place as the monthly close checklist. A separate folder is fine, but the inventory should be visible to the person who signs off on the bill. If the agent owner changes, update the row before the next review.