AI agents in an ERP are not included in the licence the way the chat assistant is. SAP, Microsoft and Oracle NetSuite all give you the basic assistant at no extra cost, then meter agents that act on their own in a separate currency: SAP AI Units, Microsoft Copilot Credits, NetSuite AI Units. At list price, 1,000 agent actions cost 140 EUR at SAP and $40 to $50 at Microsoft, and the units you prepay expire if you do not use them.
This guide reads the billing rules from each vendor's own documentation as published on 14 October 2026, puts them on one scale, and runs them against a 50-user company using the licence figures from our ERP pricing data and the per-user budgets that 339 buyers entered in the ERP Pilot comparison. It covers SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Oracle NetSuite. For what the assistants and agents actually do, see our AI in ERP comparison.
Is AI included in your ERP subscription?
The assistant is, the agents are not. All three vendors draw the same line: features that help a user who is working are part of the subscription, while agents that complete tasks on their own consume a metered unit.
- SAP. Joule Base is available at no additional cost with a qualifying SAP cloud subscription, activated through a zero-price SKU (SAP Learning). SAP's 2026 presentation lists Joule Base at 0 EUR (SAP).
- Microsoft. "Copilot in Business Central is included with your Business Central license at no extra cost", with the caveat that fair-use policies, quotas or pricing might be introduced later (Microsoft Learn, updated 2 October 2026). The Sales Order Agent, the Payables Agent and the Expense Agent are billed per use (Microsoft Learn).
- Oracle NetSuite. Every NetSuite General Access user adds 1,000 AI Units per month to a shared pool, and extra packs of 10,000 or 25,000 units can be bought (NetSuite Service Descriptions, effective 15 September 2026). So the AI is included, up to a ceiling.
SAP did not change this picture at its Connect event on 6 October 2026. The announcement put Joule Work into customer rollout and described Joule Assistants that "execute operational work directly within business workflows", but named no prices or AI Unit rates (SAP News).
How do SAP AI Units work?
An AI Unit is SAP's prepaid currency for premium AI. You buy it as an annual subscription, it is pooled across the company, and each feature draws it down at its own rate. SAP's 2026 commercial presentation sets out the terms for the current SKU 8019164: sold in blocks of 100, 12-month subscription term, "use it or lose it", no rollover, usable across all premium AI, and one AI Unit at 7 EUR (SAP presentation for SAP user groups).
- Agents: "every agent action consumes 0.02 AI Units" in 2026 (SAP Learning). SAP defines an action as a distinct operation an agent performs within a run; one run can contain several actions. That is 0.14 EUR per action at list price.
- Joule for Consultants: the one per-user package that stays, at 35 AI Units per user per month (SAP Learning), with 22,900 requests per user included and 2 AI Units per 1,000 extra requests (SAP). At 7 EUR per unit that is 245 EUR per user per month.
- Per-user packages are being retired. In a phased rollout planned for Q3 2026, most generative features from the per-user-per-month packages move into Base AI at no additional cost, and those packages are phased out (SAP Learning).
- Custom agents built in Joule Studio run on SAP BTP consumption, and SAP states they run at no additional cost under a promotion through the end of 2026 (SAP Learning).
The smallest purchase is one block: 100 AI Units, or 700 EUR at list price, which covers 5,000 agent actions over twelve months. What SAP does not publish is how many actions its own agents need for a given business task, such as one supplier invoice. Without that number, nobody outside SAP can turn the action rate into a cost per invoice, and neither do we.
The SAP pricing page did not load for us
SAP's public AI pricing page refused every request on 14 October 2026. Older search snippets of that page still show Joule Premium priced per user in tiers. SAP's own training material quoted above describes those per-user packages as being phased out. Ask your account team which terms your order form actually carries.
What do Microsoft Copilot Credits cost?
One cent each on pay-as-you-go, less on a prepaid pack. Copilot Credits are the unit for Copilot Studio agents and for the Business Central agents. The October 2026 licensing guide lists four ways to buy them (Microsoft Copilot Studio Licensing Guide):
- Pay-as-you-go: $0.01 per credit, billed in arrears through Azure (Microsoft Learn).
- Capacity pack: 25,000 credits per month for $200 per pack per month, billed annually. That is $0.008 per credit, if you use them all.
- Copilot Credit pre-purchase plan: one year upfront, from 300,000 credits at a 5% discount up to 20% at 30 million.
- Microsoft Agent pre-purchase plan: commit units worth 100 credits each, shared with Microsoft Foundry usage.
Each agent step has a fixed price in credits. A generative answer costs 2, an agent action 5, tenant graph grounding 10 (Microsoft Learn). Business Central maps its agents onto these events and publishes the result: the Payables Agent spends 50 credits per invoice plus 5 per invoice line, the Sales Order Agent 2 for reading an email, 5 for checking availability, 5 for the quote or order and 2 for the reply, and the Expense Agent 50 credits per receipt (Microsoft Learn).
💡 Key Takeaway
Microsoft is the only one of the three vendors that publishes the credit cost of its ERP agents per business task. That makes Business Central agents the easiest to budget before you buy.
How does NetSuite meter AI?
NetSuite gives every General Access user 1,000 AI Units per month and pools them for the whole account. The full quantity for the term is provisioned upfront and can be used at any time during it (Oracle NetSuite Service Descriptions). For 50 users that is 50,000 units a month, or 600,000 over a twelve-month term.
Oracle's help pages give consumption estimates per feature: a simple Ask Oracle question about 10 AI Units, an analysis question 10 to 50, a research question 50 to 200, a case summary 5 to 75 (NetSuite help). At those estimates, the per-user allowance covers about 100 simple questions or 5 to 20 research questions a month. Two contract terms matter: unused units do not carry over from term to term, and if the pool runs out, "Oracle may limit, reduce, suspend, or block access to AI-powered functionality until additional AI Units are purchased". Price protections in existing contracts do not apply to AI Unit packs (Oracle).
Oracle publishes no list price for the extra packs. NetSuite licences themselves are quote-based; our NetSuite pricing page carries the research figures of $99 to $150 per user per month plus a platform fee.
What do 1,000 agent actions cost at list price?
140 EUR at SAP, $50 at Microsoft on pay-as-you-go and $40 from a fully used pack. We converted SAP's euro figure to dollars so the bars share a scale.
| USD per 1,000 agent actions | |
|---|---|
| SAP, 0.02 AI Units per action | $152 (140 EUR) |
| Microsoft, pay-as-you-go | $50 |
| Microsoft, capacity pack fully used | $40 |
Sources: SAP rate from SAP Learning and AI Unit price of 7 EUR from an SAP presentation, converted at 1 USD = 0.92 EUR (ERP Pilot reference rate). Microsoft rates from Microsoft Learn and the Copilot Studio Licensing Guide, October 2026. All checked 14 October 2026. List prices before discounts. NetSuite has no per-action list price.
Read this chart as a unit price, not as a verdict. The two vendors do not count actions the same way: SAP counts each operation inside an agent run, Microsoft counts triggers, reasoning steps and topic transitions as agent actions. A task that takes four actions at one vendor can take ten at the other. The comparison that matters is cost per business task, and only Microsoft publishes that for its ERP agents.
What does an agent workload cost a 50-user company?
Less than the licence, but not nothing. Take a 50-user Business Central company that lets the Payables Agent process 1,000 vendor invoices a month with 3 lines each, and the Sales Order Agent answer 500 customer emails, half of them with a purchase order attached. Microsoft's credit tables put that at 65,000 plus 8,250 credits.
| USD per month at list price | |
|---|---|
| Licences, Essentials ($80 per user) | $4,000 |
| Licences, Premium ($110 per user) | $5,500 |
| Payables Agent, 1,000 invoices | $650 |
| Sales Order Agent, 500 emails | $82.50 |
Sources: licence prices from ERP Pilot pricing data for Dynamics 365 Business Central (Microsoft list price, checked 7 September 2026). Agent credits from Microsoft Learn (Payables Agent 50 credits per invoice plus 5 per line; Sales Order Agent 16.5 credits per email with half carrying a sales attachment), priced at $0.01 per credit pay-as-you-go. Scenario volumes are ERP Pilot assumptions. Calculated 14 October 2026.
Together the two agents use 73,250 credits a month: $732.50 on pay-as-you-go, or 3 capacity packs at $600, which forfeits 1,750 credits each month. The Payables Agent alone adds $13 per user per month to an $80 licence. For a company that processes 10,000 invoices, the same arithmetic gives ten times the credits, and the agent becomes a line item the controller asks about.
For SAP the same calculation cannot be done from public sources, for the reason above. For a 50-user S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition company, our research figures put the licence alone at $9,000 to $20,000 a month (see our SAP S/4HANA pricing page), so the agent budget sits on a larger base.
Does your licence budget leave room for agents?
For most buyers it does, for some it is tight. Between 14 February and 13 October 2026, 339 people told the ERP Pilot comparison the most they would pay per ERP user per month. The median answer was 230 (USD in the English quiz, EUR in the German one; both versions are pooled). That question asks about licences only; agent consumption comes on top.
| Share of answers | |
|---|---|
| Under 100 per user | 42 runs, 12% |
| 100 to 199 | 60 runs, 18% |
| 200 to 299 | 102 runs, 30% |
| 300 and more | 135 runs, 40% |
Source: ERP Pilot quiz data, 14 Feb to 13 Oct 2026, English and German versions combined (the English quiz asks in USD, the German one in EUR), n = 339. Excluded: 11 answers of exactly 210 given on or after 28 September 2026, because 210 has been the slider's preset value since then and an untouched slider cannot be told apart from a deliberate answer. 32 answers sit at the slider maximum of 400. Self-selected sample of people evaluating ERP, not a market survey. Measured 14 October 2026.
$13 per user for 1,000 invoices a month is about 6% of the median budget. For the 12% who answered under 100, it is a bigger share of a budget that already rules out most mid-market systems at list price. Either way, put a separate line for AI consumption into the business case instead of assuming it is in the licence.
When do unused units expire?
At every vendor, and on different clocks. This is where prepaid AI turns into lost money: buy for the adoption you hope for, use half of it, and the other half is gone.
| Unit | How you buy it | When unused units lapse | Pooled across |
|---|---|---|---|
| SAP AI Units | Annual subscription, blocks of 100 (SAP) | End of each contract year, no rollover (SAP for Me help) | Pooled across the enterprise and all premium AI |
| Copilot Credit pack | 25,000 credits for $200 per month, billed annually (Microsoft) | Every month; unused credits do not carry over (Microsoft Learn) | Tenant-wide, shared with other Microsoft services |
| Copilot Credits pay-as-you-go | $0.01 per credit, billed in arrears (Microsoft Learn) | Nothing to expire: you pay what was used | Per environment through an Azure billing policy |
| Copilot Credit pre-purchase (P3) | One year upfront, 5% to 20% tier discounts (Microsoft) | End of the annual term | Usable across eligible Microsoft products |
| NetSuite AI Units | 1,000 per General Access user per month, plus packs of 10,000 or 25,000 (Oracle) | End of the subscription term; whole term provisioned upfront | Pooled at account level |
Sources: vendor documentation linked in each row, checked 14 October 2026. SAP for Me shows units expiring this month and in the next three months on its Business AI tab.
Running out has consequences too. Microsoft disables custom Copilot Studio agents when a tenant reaches 125% of its prepaid capacity (Microsoft Learn). In Business Central, the AI capability is unavailable until capacity is added, and the Sales Order Agent then works through the whole backlog of unprocessed emails once credits return (Microsoft Learn). NetSuite may block AI features until more units are bought.
What should you put in the contract?
Five points, asked before signature, not at renewal:
- Actions per business task. Ask SAP and Oracle for the unit consumption of the agents you plan to use, per invoice, per order or per case, the way Microsoft publishes it for Business Central.
- Price per unit on your order form. The list figures here are starting points. Get the discounted unit price written down, and check whether price locks cover AI units. NetSuite's terms say they do not.
- Expiry and true-up. Monthly, annual or term-based expiry changes how much you should prepay. Pay-as-you-go costs more per unit but nothing lapses.
- What happens at zero. Agree alerts and whether a business process stops or overruns into a meter. An accounts payable agent that stops on the 28th of the month is a close problem.
- The free tier's future. Microsoft says fair-use limits or pricing for Copilot in Business Central might come later. Ask what notice period applies.
Agent pricing is now a selection criterion in its own right, next to licence and implementation cost. If you are building a shortlist, our ERP implementation cost guide covers the larger budget lines, the Business Central pricing page the licence side for Microsoft, and our SAP Joule guide what Joule does edition by edition.