This Month in AI
Everything in AI you missed this month, and what it actually means for your business — with a focus on the automations worth building. A free monthly briefing from the NetSys AI practice. No hype, no research papers.
This Month in AI — November 2026
This Month in AI is a free PDF briefing published each month by The NetSys Group’s AI practice. It covers what actually happened in AI over the past month, translates it into what changes for a small or mid-sized business, and names the specific automations worth building next — plus the announcements you can safely ignore.
October brought few headline launches and many changed defaults. Microsoft is repackaging Copilot into new SKUs from 1 December, AI Builder credits ended on 1 November, and four settings opened up agent access unless an admin reverses them. Claude Haiku 5.5 matched GPT-6 Luna at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens, and OpenAI set a 14 January shutdown for gpt-4o and gpt-4.1.
- Copilot's current add-on offers end of sale in CSP on 1 December, when standalone SKUs arrive. CSP discounts (Copilot Business 15% off, Business Basic + Copilot 25% off) run to 31 December.
- Usage billing turns on by default for new Copilot Business seats: mid-November direct (Business Premium tenants first), 1 December via CSP. The default 4,000-credit limit allows up to $40 per user per month.
- AI Builder credits ended on 1 November. Document-reading flows fall back to Copilot Credits, and stop if you have neither, once your current licence term ends.
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (7 Oct) costs $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens, about 90% less than Haiku 4.5. Prompts over 100K tokens bill at 5×. GPT-6.1 Terra (26 Oct) is $1/$5.
- OpenAI shuts down gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4.1 and gpt-4.1-mini on 14 January 2027. On the new Artificial Analysis Index v5, the best downloadable open model scores 32, against 58 for Claude Opus 5.5.
- Automation of the Month: a Monday renewal-risk watch across Jobber, Zendesk, HubSpot, QuickBooks and Microsoft 365 lifted gross revenue retention from 86.4% to 94.1%. It costs $15.92 a month to run.
- MonthlyCadence
- FreePrice
- PDFFormat
- What actually shipped
The model releases, feature launches, and pricing changes that matter to a business — filtered down from the noise, in plain English.
- Automations worth building
Specific workflows you could put in place this month — quoting, intake, scheduling, invoicing, reporting — and roughly what each one takes.
- Risk and governance
Where your data goes when staff use these tools, which permissions to check, and the shadow-AI habits worth catching early.
- What to ignore
The announcements that sound big and change nothing for a company your size. Knowing what to skip saves more time than knowing what to chase.
Published by the NetSys AI practice · November 2026 edition · Free PDF download
Download the free briefing
This month’s briefing, in full
The complete November 2026 edition — dated, attributed, and marked GA only where the vendor says so. The designed PDF version is free above.
The 60-second version
October brought few headline launches and many changed defaults. Several settings now favour more spending and more agent access unless an admin turns them back. Five things changed:
- Copilot is being repackaged. On 14 October Microsoft announced that current Copilot offers get "(add-on)" names. From 1 December 2026, new SKUs no longer need a base subscription, and the add-on offers reach end of sale in CSP. Existing subscriptions keep their prices. CSP discounts on Copilot Business (15% off, 1–300 seats, annual) and Business Basic + Copilot Business (25% off) run to 31 December.
- AI Builder credits ended on 1 November. New and renewed Power Platform and Dynamics 365 licences no longer include them (MC1526652). When existing credits run out, usage falls back to Copilot Credits. With neither, flows that read invoices and forms are blocked.
- Four agent defaults opened up. Any user can upload agents that have actions or use MCP servers (MC1472007, from 25 October). Any Entra user can create agent identities (MC1506733, from 4 November). Premium models are billable in Office apps, off by default (MC1519122). And SharePoint's KnowledgeAgentScope exclusions stopped being honoured on 1 November.
- The cheap tier collapsed. Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens, the same as GPT-6 Luna. GPT-6.1 Terra is $1/$5. OpenAI shuts down gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4.1 and gpt-4.1-mini on 14 January 2027.
- Open-model scores reset. Artificial Analysis moved to Index v5 on 27 October. The best downloadable open model now scores 32, against 58 for Claude Opus 5.5. These figures don't compare with last issue's.
Microsoft: new SKUs, and a meter by default
Usage billing on new Copilot Business seats moved again. Direct purchases now get it from mid-November, Business Premium tenants first and others "at a later date". CSP purchases get it from 1 December 2026. The default limit is 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, which at $0.01 a credit is up to $40 per user. Set a spending policy before you buy seats. GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 reach the model picker in Chat, Word, Excel and PowerPoint from early to mid-November, billed per use with no published credit rates. They are off by default.
Business Central agent rates were unchanged. The Payables Agent costs 50 credits per invoice plus 5 per line, so a 10-line invoice is about $1.00 and 300 of them a month is about $300. Power Apps Premium rises from $20 to $22 per user per month from 1 January 2027.
SharePoint after KnowledgeAgentScope
Copilot in SharePoint is GA, and sites you excluded with PowerShell are now in scope. The replacements are per-site Site AI settings and Restricted Content Discovery. Neither changes who can open a file, so fix permissions first. Sources disagree on whether Restricted Content Discovery needs SharePoint Advanced Management. SharePoint ".agent" agents can't be created from mid-November and are cut off in early April 2027 (MC1511052).
Business Central v29
v29 shipped at the start of October. Partner blogs say 1–2 October; Microsoft's page gives no date. Payables Agent PO matching is GA. The new Copilot chat experience and Expense Agent additions are public preview. You can schedule the update through February 2027. SOAP endpoints on Microsoft's own pages stop working in v29, so check older integrations first.
Governance
- Targeted Release retires in January 2027, replaced by Frontier, Standard and Deferred (MC1490899).
- Purview DLP for Copilot Cowork was planned for GA from mid-October (MC1477182). We could not confirm the rollout finished.
- The App Builder agent and vibe.powerapps.com retire on 30 November.
- Microsoft cancelled moving Copilot out of the Teams chat list (MC1477999).
OpenAI
GPT-6.1 Terra (26 October) is a mid-tier model for screen and cross-app work at $1 input, $0.05 cached and $5 output per million tokens, with a 1.05M-token context. Prompts over 272K tokens pay 2× input and 1.5× output on the whole request. Deprecations announced in October: tts-1, tts-1-hd and gpt-4o-mini-tts shut down 6 January 2027. gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, gpt-4.1 and gpt-4.1-mini shut down 14 January 2027. gpt-5.1, gpt-5.3-codex and gpt-5.4-nano shut down 1 April 2027. OpenAI's data-controls page now also lists /v1/agents, /v1/chatkit/threads, /v1/evals, /v1/batches and /v1/audio/voices as not eligible for Zero Data Retention.
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 5.5 (7 October) costs $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens. Longer prompts bill the whole request at $0.50/$2.50. It drops temperature, top_p, top_k and prefill. Sonnet 5.5 cache reads fell from $0.20 to $0.10 (release notes). API version 2026-10-21 is the first new version since 2023 and rejects sampling parameters, so pin your SDK versions. Team plans now include up to $500 a month in pooled API credits (pricing). The BAA article now also excludes fast mode, Claude Tag, Design/Slides/Docs and Claude Code via cloud providers. The Computer Use API now appears as covered. The article is undated, so confirm it in writing.
Open-weight models
October releases: Meta's Muse Spark Open (816B, 42B active; attribution plus a separate agreement for hosted-service use), Reflection AI's Beam 1.0 (Apache 2.0), DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (MIT), MiniMax M3.1 Flash ($20M revenue line, attribution), Mistral Large 4 (hosted service needs a commercial licence), and NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B (OpenMDW-1.1), which needs about 28 GB free, so a 32 GB card. These hosted-resale clauses don't apply to running the models in-house for your own staff.
Automation of the Month: the Monday renewal-risk watch
The client is a 96-person commercial cleaning company in Westchester and Fairfield County with about $14M in revenue and 212 recurring contracts. It had learned about 11 lost contracts a median of 9 days before they ended. Every Sunday night a job pulls Jobber, Zendesk, HubSpot, QuickBooks Online and Microsoft 365 data into Postgres. SQL computes eight risk signals per account. Claude Haiku 5.5 classifies email threads, and one Claude Sonnet 5.5 call ranks about 40 flagged accounts into nine tiered actions by 06:30 Monday. Over three quarters, gross revenue retention rose from 86.4% to 94.1%, surprise losses fell to 2, and median warning time rose to 71 days. It took 41 build hours and costs $15.92 a month to run. The client is anonymised, and these are that engagement's figures, not a benchmark.
Every item is dated and attributed, and features are marked GA only where the vendor says so. Some items we could not verify. The full text of MC1476200 and the mid-November date come from a mirror. Business Central v29's exact GA date isn't on Microsoft's page. Purview DLP for Cowork may not have finished rolling out. ChatGPT product updates came from aggregators because openai.com did not load. Some open-model parameter counts conflict between sources. The full 15-page PDF edition is free below.
This edition stays online at its own address: This Month in AI, November 2026.
Every edition
Each edition stays online in full on its own page, so past months remain easy to find and cite. The designed PDFs are free too: submit the form above once and every edition becomes downloadable.
AI briefing FAQs
Is the AI briefing really free?
Yes. Enter your name and work email and the download unlocks immediately. You'll get each new monthly edition by email; unsubscribe anytime.
Who writes it?
The NetSys Group's AI practice, led by Jamie Baum, who runs AI implementations for our clients. It reflects what we are actually deploying in real businesses, not a summary of press releases.
How often is a new edition published?
Monthly. Each edition covers the prior month in AI and what to act on next. Every edition stays online in full on its own page, linked from the archive below, so you can find and cite past months.
Who is it written for?
Business owners, operations managers, and internal IT at small and mid-sized companies — people who need to know what AI changes for their business without reading research papers.
Is it technical?
No. It's written for the person deciding whether to spend money and staff time on something, with enough specifics that whoever implements it knows where to start.
Can I share it with my team?
Please do — forward the PDF to your team, your leadership, or your IT provider. It works best when the people who would use the tools read it too.
Want the security equivalent? Our engineers publish a monthly cyber threat report as well.
Reading about automation is not the same as having it.
The briefing tells you what's possible. Our AI practice builds it — secure, scoped to your workflows, and measured against the hours or revenue it's supposed to move.