If you want to use Microsoft’s cutting edge AI to reduce your workload, you better hope your employer is willing to spend big.
The tech company announced on Tuesday that it plans to charge $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Copilot. That’s what Microsoft is calling the artificial intelligence engine that will be integrated across its productivity software.
Co-pilot offers a similar experience to using ChatGPT and users will be able to command the AI to complete tasks in Office apps.
Copilot can edit or alter the tone of Word documents, summarise the trends in an Excel spreadsheet, generate multi-slide presentations in PowerPoint, draft emails in Outlook and take notes during Team meetings.
Microsoft said Copilot will eventually be available to 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers. Though it stopped short of announcing a launch date, it said it would “share more on timing” in the coming months.
While the idea of handing over some of your daily work chores to an AI sounds appealing, that monthly price tag may put the tech out of the reach of small businesses.
Unless, of course, you can convince your employer of the extra time you’d be saving as a result of the AI helper. Just don’t overdo it or you may wind up being replaced by a bot altogether.
To sweeten the deal, Microsoft is throwing in a new privacy-focused version of its Bing chatbot that it claims won’t leak your corporate secrets.
A growing number of firms including Apple, Samsung and major US banks have banned employees from using ChatGPT in an effort to protect their data. Unlike that bot, Mictrosoft said its Bing Chat Enterprise tool does not save your chat history.
Microsoft is also promising to safeguard your data from prying eyes, including its own, and claims it won’t use the info to train its AI models.
So why is Microsoft charging extra for AI Copilot? Well, firstly, generative AI systems are extremely costly to run: A recent report estimated that ChatGPT costs $700,000 (£546,000) per day to operate.
Microsoft has also poured $10 billion into ChatGPT founder OpenAI in order to get first dibs on its powerful AI systems.
But, if Microsoft 360 Copilot is out of your budget, you could settle for Google’s alternative. The company began testing generative AI features for its Workspace apps in March, with plans to give them to the public in the near future.
The tech can perform similar tasks to Copilot such as drafting emails in Gmail, writing and proofreading in Docs, generating images and video in Slides, and extracting insights from raw data in Sheets. Knowing Google, it could release the new features for free as it makes the lion’s share of its revenue by showing people targeted ads.
Meanwhile, a subscription to ChatGPT Plus – and with it access to OpenAI’s most advanced chatbot, GPT-4 – costs $20 (£15.50) a month.
