Soon after it announced an expansion of its partnership with Meta to roll out Llama 2 for commercial use for free, Microsoft has now announced the pricing for its AI-powered Copilot for Microsoft 365, at the ‘Inspire’ event. It also lifted the veil off Bing Chat Enterprise, a version of the company’s AI-powered chatbot with business-focused data privacy and governance controls. This comes after the company began testing Copilot with a small group of select enterprise partners earlier this year.
Going forwards, Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers. With a GPT-4-powered suite of tools, Microsoft 365 Copilot can be used to seamlessly generate Office content using natural-language text prompts at a fraction of the time that would have been consumed if the content had to be produced manually.
“By grounding answers in business data like your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining them with your working context — the meeting you’re in now, the emails you’ve exchanged on a topic, the chats you had last week — Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and more actionable responses to your questions,” Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Chief Communications Officer, wrote in an announcement. The revelation of the pricing provided a minor boost to Microsoft’s stocks on July 18, which jumped to an all-time high of $359.49.
Copilot seamlessly integrates into Microsoft’s Office of Apps – including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and others, thus helping in the automation of repetitive tasks like summarizing text or scheduling meetings and bringing together user efforts across various apps – such as asking PowerPoint to create presentations based on Word documents or analyzing data via Excel – all by typing simple commands.
Microsoft, in its blog post, announced that it comes with the capabilities of Bing Chat Enterprise, which will be included at no extra cost. The company notes that Bing Chat Enterprise will be accessible “wherever Bing Chat is supported,” and is rolling out in preview today. Going forward, the AI-powered chatbot will be made available as a stand-alone offering for a monthly fee of $5 per user. Users can access it using their work account, and in time, it will also come to Windows Copilot.
Of course, Microsoft is doubling down on data protection and user privacy with Bing Chat Enterprise. The company noted that the chat data is not saved in this tool, the customer data is not used to train the underlying AI models, and Microsoft itself cannot view a customer’s employee or business data. And if this is not enough, the tech giant also announced Visual Search in Chat – giving users of Bing Chat the ability to search via images.
Much like Google’s Bard, Microsoft is expanding the search capabilities for its AI-powered chatbot to remain relevant in the AI race. With the new feature, users can upload images and search the web for related content, letting Bing understand the context of an image, analyze and interpret it, and answer questions about it. This feature is now rolling out via desktop and the Bing mobile app, and is set to come to Bing Chat Enterprise “over time,” Microsoft noted.
