Before you begin, see About enterprise accounts for Copilot Business to understand how to use a standard enterprise account for Copilot Business without consuming GitHub Enterprise Cloud licenses.
Create an enterprise account
If you don't have an enterprise account yet, contact GitHub's sales team. They will provision you with a standard enterprise account with Copilot enabled.
If you already have an enterprise account, you can use it to assign Copilot Business licenses. Continue to the next section.
Add users to your enterprise
Once you have an enterprise account, add the people who will receive Copilot Business licenses. How you add users depends on your enterprise type: invite personal accounts directly to the enterprise, or provision managed user accounts from your identity provider (IdP) through SCIM. For detailed steps, see Adding users to your enterprise.
Add users directly to the enterprise so that they remain unaffiliated. Adding users to an organization assigns GitHub Enterprise licenses, while adding users directly to the enterprise keeps your setup limited to Copilot Business.
Provisioned managed users appear automatically in your enterprise's People list. You can then assign Copilot Business licenses directly to these users or to enterprise teams synced with your IdP.
Create enterprise teams (optional)
Group users to scale license assignment by creating enterprise teams. Unaffiliated users can be members of enterprise teams, so you can assign Copilot Business licenses to a whole team without creating an organization. See Creating enterprise teams.
Convert your trial to a paid enterprise account
To begin using Copilot Business after your trial, convert to a paid enterprise account. See Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
Enable Copilot for the enterprise
- Ensure you are signed in as an enterprise administrator on GitHub.
- To purchase GitHub Copilot for your enterprise, contact GitHub's Sales team.
Assign Copilot licenses
Give people access to Copilot by assigning Copilot Business licenses to users or enterprise teams.
For detailed steps, see Granting users access to GitHub Copilot in your enterprise.
Govern the use of Copilot in your enterprise
After you assign licenses, you can centrally govern how members use Copilot:
- Policies. Control feature availability with policies in AI Controls.
- Enterprise managed settings. Distribute client governance and extensibility configuration from a centrally defined source. For example, you can disable bypass mode, restrict plugins, and set the default model for new conversations. See Configuring enterprise-managed settings.
To use server-managed settings, you need an organization and a .github-private repository, which requires a GitHub Enterprise license for the user who creates them. Alternatively, you can deploy managed settings through MDM or a file-based deployment without creating an organization.
If your enterprise already contains an organization
If you only need Copilot Business, but your enterprise already contains an organization, you are consuming GitHub Enterprise Cloud licenses and will be billed for them.
Step 1: Check your unaffiliated users policy
If your enterprise uses personal accounts and the unaffiliated users policy is set to remove users, people who no longer have access to any organizations will be removed from the enterprise and lose all privileges and licenses granted from the enterprise, including Copilot licenses. Enterprise owners and billing managers are not affected by this policy. Before you remove any organizations, make sure this policy is set to Remain in the enterprise. See Controlling user offboarding with the unaffiliated users policy.
Step 2: Remove the organization
Important
Before taking action, make sure you review the effects of removing or deleting an organization in the linked documentation.
- If your enterprise uses personal accounts, remove the organization from your enterprise. See Removing organizations from your enterprise.
- If you use Enterprise Managed Users, you can delete the organization. See Deleting an organization account.
If removal or deletion is not an option, you can reduce license consumption by removing most of the organization's members. However, at least one organization owner will need to remain, and some non-members may continue consuming a license. See People who consume a license in an organization.
Step 3: Confirm your members are unaffiliated
On your enterprise's People page, confirm that the people who need Copilot Business are still in the enterprise and are now listed as unaffiliated users, and that they still hold their Copilot licenses.
Step 4: Update your license count
Depending on how you are billed, reducing license consumption may not reduce your bill on its own.
- Usage-based license billing: no action needed. You are billed for the licenses you consume. To monitor spending, you can set budgets and alerts. See Setting up budgets to control spending on metered products.
- Volume license billing: you must reduce your paid license count yourself. See Managing user licenses for an organization or enterprise.
- Invoiced billing: contact your account manager in GitHub's Sales team.
If you have already been charged for GitHub Enterprise Cloud licenses that you did not intend to use, contact us through the GitHub Support portal.
Next steps
Help your developers start using Copilot and measure its impact. See Driving GitHub Copilot adoption in your company.
