Microsoft puts a price on Copilot, its artificial intelligence for Office

A few months after the presentation of Copilot, the artificial intelligence-based assistant for Office, Microsoft has finally revealed the price we’ll have to pay to use it. The tech giant took advantage of the start of its Inspire conference to announce that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per month..

Microsoft 365 Copilot will be offered in Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, and E5 plans. Price does not include monthly fee for office suite, so if you contract with the assistant on the Standard Enterprise ($12), you will have to pay $42 per user. At first glance, the price seems high, although justified if it does what it promises.

The co-pilot is Master based on GPT-4, the artificial intelligence that powers ChatGPT. Its integration opens up new features in the applications that make up the Microsoft 365 suite. For example, in Word, you can draft, add content to existing documents, summarize text, and rewrite sections. In PowerPoint, it is capable of converting a Word file into a full-fledged presentation with speaker comments.

For their part, users excel they do not have to learn formulas or shortcuts, as it will be enough to use natural language for Copilot to perform a mathematical operation. The wizard can also create models, identify trends, and create visualizations with a simple command. Anyway, AI is offered as a chatbot which appears in the sidebar, similar to Bing in Edge.

Over the past few months, Microsoft has been testing its AI with a limited number of companies. Yusuf Mehdi, director of consumer marketing, mentioned that already 600 clients at the early access stage, including Emirates, Lumen and KPMG. According to Mehdi, “the more they use the co-pilot, the more their enthusiasm grows” for the assistant.

With Copilot, Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence

The appearance of the co-pilot in the office is part of the strategy for Bring artificial intelligence to all Microsoft products and services. Having made a multi-million dollar investment in OpenAI, a tech company wants to take advantage of the technology, and Bing with ChatGPT is an example.

A popular chatbot has been integrated into a web browser to make requests or generate texts in natural language. A few months later, Bing made the leap to business customers with Corporate chat. The app maintains the core functionality of its web counterpart, although the AI ​​relies on a closed dataset to train the model.

Microsoft is also preparing to roll out Co-pilot in Windows 11. Artificial intelligence will be added to the operating system to offer suggestions and support the user in his daily. Like Office, the assistant will be able to perform tasks and automate processes based on what appears on the screen, similar to what was once required with Cortana.

All of these features are in beta testing at the moment, with no release date set. Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise will be available to enterprise customers, and Windows Copilot may be available in the Fall Update for consumer versions of Windows 11.