Microsoft announce the GA of Microsoft Discovery, a brand-new AI platform designed to build and govern agentic workflows for complex scientific and engineering research. It helps researchers coordinate specialised Agents, connect to data, and speed up breakthroughs.

Licensing-wise, it uses Azure resources billed via the standard Pay-As-You-Go route, but there’s also a new billing unit called “User Messages” to track billable Agent actions. To help estimate costs, Microsoft explain that one User Message equals ten backend operations and costs $0.20.

The complementary Discovery App is in preview for smaller teams and students letting you start small before scaling up to the larger computing power of the cloud-hosted Microsoft Discovery services. The App runs locally as a desktop application consuming GitHub Copilot Credits, and thus users do need to be licensed for GitHub Copilot.

Find the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3Sa7NiC, useful billing information here: https://bit.ly/3TpR7nC, and an interesting case study here: https://bit.ly/4p7cnKJ.