A lot of small firms buy Microsoft 365 Business Premium, see that Intune is included, and assume device management is handled. The licence is there. The management usually is not. Here is the honest answer to whether you still need to do anything, and what "included" really means.
What Business Premium already gives you
Business Premium is a genuinely good bundle. It includes the Intune licence, Entra ID Plan 1, Defender for Business, and the tools to manage and secure laptops and phones. So the capability is all sitting in your tenant, paid for, ready. That part is real and it is why the bundle is such good value for a small firm.
What the licence alone does not do
Here is the catch. Intune does nothing until someone configures it. Out of the box your tenant has the engine but no policies. No compliance rules, no Conditional Access, no app deployment, no encryption enforcement, no update rings. Buying Business Premium is like buying a security system still in the box. The licence is not the service, and the gap between "we have Intune" and "Intune is actually protecting us" is all the setup nobody did.
So do you need to act
If you have Business Premium and nobody has configured Intune and Entra, then yes, there is work to do, and it is work you have already paid the licence for. The good news is you do not need to buy anything else. You need the policies built once and then kept current as Microsoft changes things and as people join and leave. That is the whole job.
The honest answer
You do not need more licences. You need the ones you have turned on properly. For a firm with no one to do that, this is exactly what a Hardening project sets up and Managed Intune keeps running, on the Business Premium you already own.