Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft May 20 Briefing event at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, on May 20, 2024. Nadella unveiled a new category of PC on Monday that features generative artificial intelligence tools built directly into Windows, the company’s world leading operating system.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft on Wednesday announced a tier of its Copilot assistant for corporate users with a consumption-based pricing model. The new Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat option represents an alternative to the Microsoft 365 Copilot, which organizations have been able to pay for based on the number of employees with access to it.
The introduction shows Microsoft’s determination to popularize generative artificial intelligence software in the workplace. Several companies have adopted the Microsoft 365 Copilot since it became available for $30 per person per month in November 2023, but one group of analysts recently characterized the product push as “slow/underwhelming.”
Copilot Chat can be an on-ramp to Microsoft 365 Copilot, with a lower barrier to entry, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at work, said in a CNBC interview this week. Both offerings rely on artificial intelligence models from Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Copilot Chat can fetch information from the web and summarize text in uploaded documents, and people using it can create agents that perform tasks in the background. It can enrich answers with information from customers’ files and third-party sources.
Unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat can’t be found in Office applications such as Word and Excel. People can reach Copilot Chat starting today in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for Windows, Android and iOS. The app is formerly known as Microsoft 365 (Office). It’s also available from the web at m365copilot.com, a spokesperson said.
Some management teams have resisted paying Microsoft to give the 365 Copilot to thousands of employees because they weren’t sure how helpful it would be at the $30 monthly price. Costs will vary for the Copilot Chat depending on what employees do with it, but at least organizations won’t end up paying for nonuse.
“As one customer said to me, this model lets the business value prove itself,” Spataro said.
Microsoft tallies up charges for Copilot Chat based on the tally of “messages” that a client uses. Each “message” costs a penny, according to a blog post. Responses that draw on the client’s proprietary files cost 30 “messages” each. Every action that an agent takes on behalf of employees costs 25 “messages.”
“We’re talking a cent, 2 cents, 30 cents, and that is a very easy way for people to get started,” Spataro said.
Salesforce charges $2 per conversation for its Agentforce AI chat service, where employees can set up automated sales and customer service processes.
The number of people using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day more than doubled quarter over quarter, CEO Satya Nadella said in October, although he did not disclose how many were using it. But sign-ups have been mounting. UBS said in October that it had 50,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, and in November, Accenture committed to having 200,000 users of the tool.
