The team’s populated, it’s attached to an org, everyone’s where they’re meant to be. Naturally, the next thing you want to do is give them Copilot. And naturally, the obvious place to do that feels like the enterprise level, right at the top, once for everyone.
That’s the wrong move, and it’s worth knowing why before you make it.
Licensing is an org-level concern, not a team-level one
Here’s the thing nobody tells you upfront: the enterprise team got your users into the org, but it doesn’t hold the licence itself. The licence is assigned to the user, inside the org. The team was just the routing mechanism that got them there.
It sounds like a small distinction. It isn’t.
The Business vs Enterprise trap
Assign a Copilot licence at the enterprise team level, or anywhere at the enterprise level generally, and you’ll only ever get a Business licence out. Not Enterprise.
And it’s the same if you try and do it for an enterprise team as well
To get an Enterprise licence, the assignment has to happen at the org level, against users within that org.
Why does this trip people up? Because the enterprise level feels like the top of the tree, and doing something once at the top instead of repeatedly further down feels like the efficient move. It’s the wrong layer for this specific thing, and GHE won’t stop you from doing it wrong. It’ll just quietly hand you the lower tier and let you find out later.
Assigning the licence correctly, at org level
Now I say correctly here, and it is, for me. If you do want your users to have business licenses then doing it as the above would be okay! However, to do it this way, we need to go into the Copilot settings in the organisation and then access.
Whole org vs selected users
There is something to consider when you are assigning the licenses. Do you give them to everyone in the org, or do you just give it to selected users. Generally, you probably want to give it to everyone in the organisation if you are working as an agentic engineering function. This does of course mean that everyone in the org is racking up the bill for the month so you may not want to if you have product or PM users who are not actively using Copilot.
Firstly I didn’t setup as all users in an org as I was worried about duplication of licenses and thus the cost. We have more than one org and users can sit in a few of them. However this is confirmed in the UI as a safe thing to do:
This is only visible at the enterprise view so you may have missed it like I did initially, but it is there and is a nice way to simplify the management.
Closing thought
Getting the right licence tier assigned is only half the story. The other half is what people are actually allowed to do once they’ve got it, and that’s where enterprise policy comes in. That’s Part 4.
