Microsoft is looking to make AI more accessible and flexible for businesses. It has now rolled out Copilot Chat, a pay-as-you-go service that is designed as an alternative to the full-featured Microsoft 365 Copilot. Users can access Copilot Chat live in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
“Our ambition is to empower every employee with a Copilot and to transform every business process with agents. From Dow to Disney, companies are going big with Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents, uncovering key scenarios that can deliver real ROI. Now, organizations of all sizes are looking to scale their AI transformation and realize the enterprise-wide ROI that comes with broad adoption,” the company announced in a blog post. “Today, we’re introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a new offering that adds pay-as-you-go agents to our existing free chat experience for Microsoft 365 commercial customers. Copilot Chat enables your entire workforce—from customer service representatives to marketing leads to frontline technicians—to start using Copilot and agents today,” it added.
Copilot Chat offers a consumption-based pricing model (which differs from the fixed-cost subscription associated with Microsoft 365 Copilot). It allows businesses to pay only for the specific features or services they use, thus lowering the financial entry barrier. This is useful for smaller enterprises or companies with limited AI requirements, as they can experiment with AI tools without having to get a full subscription package. Other capabilities of Copilot Chat include leveraging GPT-4o to summarize the summarize key points in files that users can upload, draft work documents, or roll out AI-generated images.
In addition to this, users can interact with AI agents to perform a variety of tasks, including automating workflows. The catch is that Copilot Chat does not integrate with applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot). Speaking more about the AI-driven agents, they can execute specific actions such as retrieving customer account details, providing contextually relevant insights during meetings, and delivering real-time product information for on-the-ground operations. Businesses can also customize these agents. In addition to this, Microsoft is also rolling out management tools for IT administrators to ensure these AI agents are securely managed. The Copilot Control System, for example, allows for greater oversight of agent activity.
These agents will be priced on a “metered basis,” according to Microsoft. More precisely, instead of a fixed monthly fee, costs are determined by the number of interactions initiated by users. Simple text-based queries are priced at $0.01 per message, while tasks that involve proprietary or organizational data are priced higher at $0.30 per message. For actions taken by AI agents on behalf of employees, businesses are charged $0.25 per action.
