Copilot is Microsoft’s tackle productivity-boosting generative AI, and it continues to grow and expand with Microsoft’s AI ambitions. Today, there are around a dozen Copilot-branded products powering various capabilities in Microsoft software and services, like summarizations in Microsoft Outlook and transcriptions in Microsoft Teams.
That’s along with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s Copilot tool for generating code, and the Copilot that lives on Windows and the online, which serves as a general-purpose assistant.
In this post, we explain the various Microsoft Copilots available and what they do, and the differences between the premium and free editions.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot, previously generally known as Bing Chat, is built into Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, in addition to Windows 10, Windows 11, and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. (Newer PCs actually have a dedicated keyboard key for launching Copilot.) There’s also stand-alone Copilot apps for Android and iOS and an in-app Telegram room.
Powered by fine-tuned versions of OpenAI’s models (OpenAI and Microsoft have a detailed working relationship), Copilot can perform a spread of tasks described in natural language, like writing poems and essays, in addition to translating text into other languages and summarizing sources from around the online (albeit imperfectly).
Copilot, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, can browse the online (in Copilot’s case, via Bing) for up-to-date information. It sometimes gets things flawed, but for timely queries, access to go looking results give Copilot a bonus over offline bots corresponding to Anthropic’s Claude.
Copilot can create images by tapping Image Creator, Microsoft’s image generator built on OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model. And it could generate songs via an integration with Suno, the AI music-generating platform. Typing something like “Create a picture of a zebra” or “Generate a song with a jazz rhythm” in Copilot will pull within the relevant tool.
On the topic of integrations, Copilot supports plug-ins for third-party apps and web sites. There’s plug-ins for Instacart (for meal planning and cooking-related questions), Kayak (for trip planning), OpenTable (for restaurant reservations) and Shopify, to call just a few examples. More are being added frequently.
Copilot also drives Copilot Pages, an embeddable digital canvas where users can edit and share Copilot-originated content. Paying customers (more on that below) get access to BizChat, a business-focused hub that ties into Pages to drag data from the online (and work files) to assist create things like project plans, meeting notes, proposals, and more.
Which Windows settings can Copilot control?
On Windows 11 (but not necessarily Windows 10), Copilot can control certain settings and functions, acting as a digital concierge of sorts.
With Copilot, either by typing or using Windows 11’s speech recognition functionality, users can perform actions on a PC like turning the battery saver on or off, showing device and system information, launching live captions, displaying the PC’s IP address, and emptying the recycle bin.
A toggle within the Copilot experience on Windows 11 switches between “Work” and “Web” mode, with the previous bringing Copilot’s Microsoft 365 capabilities within the Windows interface.
What is Copilot Pro?
Copilot Pro is Microsoft’s premium Copilot product, priced at $20 per 30 days.
Copilot Pro customers get priority access to essentially the most capable OpenAI models (e.g., o1) during peak times. And select features of Copilot can only be accessed with a Pro subscription, corresponding to higher-resolution images from Image Creator.
Copilot Pro also gives users access to generative AI functions across the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.
In Word and OneNote, Copilot can write, edit, summarize, and generate text. Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint can turn natural language prompts into presentations and visualizations (optionally grounded in data from files and templates). And in Outlook, Copilot might help draft email responses with toggles for adjusting the length or tone.
More features as a part of Microsoft’s Copilot Wave 2 update are coming down the pipeline.
Copilot in PowerPoint will soon pull in company-approved images from a SharePoint library, while Outlook will get a “Prioritize my inbox” capability that summarizes each email (and offers insights like who you’ve been most responsive too). In late 2024, Outlook users may also gain the power to “teach” Copilot topics, keywords, and other people of interest in order that those emails are all the time marked as high-priority.
In Excel, Copilot can format data, create graphs, generate pivot tables and guide users through creating recent formulas and macros. It also can make use of the programming language Python for advanced data evaluation – in natural language, users can describe forecasting, risk evaluation, and data visualization tasks and Copilot will translate the text to the needed Python code to perform these tasks.
A future version of Copilot in Word will allow you to quickly pull in data from outside Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents in addition to emails, encrypted docs, and meetings. Elsewhere, in OneDrive, Copilot will summarize, show metrics about, and compare the differences between files for you.
Beyond the Microsoft 365 upgrades, Copilot Pro subscribers get landscape formatting options and 100 “boosts” per day in Image Creator (versus only 15 per day free of charge users) to hurry up the image-generation process.
Importantly, Copilot Pro include Copilot in Teams, a Copilot feature in Microsoft Teams that gives real-time summaries and motion items while handling tasks like identifying people for follow-ups. Copilot in Teams is exclusive to enterprise Copilot customers, meaning those with an enterprise-class (or equivalent) Microsoft 365 license.
What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Separate and distinct from the patron Copilot SKU is Microsoft 365 Copilot, a group of generative AI add-ons to Microsoft 365 with an emphasis on business apps.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is priced at $30 per user per 30 days and available to customers with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license. It delivers lots of the same capabilities across the Microsoft 365 family of apps as Copilot Pro, but with the addition of “enterprise-grade data protection” and the Semantic Index, a back-end system that creates a map of the info and content in a company to permit Copilot to deliver more personalized responses.
Microsoft recently launched Microsoft 365 Chat, for instance, a tool that pulls info from content across Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Word docs, PowerPoint presentations) to reply questions.
There are many, many Copilots besides. Here’s a partial list of them and their “skills”:
- Copilot in Power Pages can generate text, forms, chatbots, and web page layouts, and may create and edit image and site design themes.
- Copilot for Sales might help write email responses to customers or perform sales-related tasks corresponding to sending summaries of Teams meetings through Outlook.
- Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can proactively flag issues like weather, financials, and geography that may impact supply chain processes.
- Copilot for Service can draft answers to customer queries via chat or email and supply a chat experience for customer support agents that attracts from knowledge bases in addition to case history.
- Copilot for Azure can suggest configurations for Microsoft Azure-hosted apps and environments and help with troubleshooting by identifying potential issues and solutions.
- Copilot for Security goals to summarize and “make sense” of various types of cyberthreat intelligence.
- Copilot in Fabric helps explore, prepare, and visualize data.
- Copilot in Intune helps manage security policies and settings and troubleshoot device issues.
- Team Copilot might help manage meeting agendas in Teams and extend to Loop and Planner to create and assign tasks, track deadlines, and notify team members when their input is required.
Note that a few of Microsoft’s Copilots, like Copilot in Business Central, are included in the bottom software licenses and don’t require paying an extra fee. Others, like Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, cost an additional $20 per user per 30 days or $50 per user per 30 days without an lively Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription.
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio is a dashboard that lets customers give Microsoft 365 Copilot access to data of their, or a 3rd party’s, customer relationship management software, enterprise resource management systems, and other databases and repositories using prebuilt connectors or connectors they construct themselves. Through Copilot Studio, customers can construct guardrails for Copilots and create and publish their very own custom-tailored “copilots.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers can tap Copilot Studio to create their very own custom copilot by describing it in natural language. Copilots can filter to specific datasets for particular teams or users, or connect with an automation, plug-in, or third-party service to kick off actions or a workflow.
Copilot Studio can also be where customers can craft what Microsoft calls Copilot agents. These AI bots — which might be “@ mentioned” in Outlook and Teams — leverage memory and knowledge of context to navigate different business workflows, learning from user feedback and asking for help after they encounter situations they don’t know how one can handle.
Copilot agents range in capability from easy, prompt-and-response agents to more sophisticated bots — think bots that may monitor email inboxes and automate data entry. Microsoft provides numerous pre-built ones, including the Visual creator agent that generates images, designs, and shortly videos.
What is GitHub Copilot?
Not to be confused with the various other Copilots in Microsoft’s portfolio, GitHub Copilot is a set of tools for generating code and supporting programming work. GitHub Copilot might be installed as an extension for IDEs including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains, or utilized in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
The generative AI model underpinning GitHub Copilot has been trained on billions of lines of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of other programming languages — lots of them hosted and available publicly on GitHub. When you’re writing code, GitHub Copilot suggests code as you type; you possibly can cycle through suggestions and accept or reject them.
GitHub Copilot also can translate code into natural language descriptions, and Copilot Extensions allow developers to increase Copilot with third-party skills.
GitHub Copilot is out there free of charge for college students and for “verified” open source contributors and educators. For individuals, it’s $10 per 30 days. For business customers, it’s $19 per 30 days per user. And for enterprises, it’s $39 per user per 30 days.
Individual, business and enterprise subscribers get Copilot Chat together with GitHub Copilot, a chatbot-like flow that’s aware of your complete context of the code they’re working on and may answer questions on that code. In addition to answering coding queries, Chat might help developers fix errors and bugs and address security issues through code evaluation.
The enterprise and business GitHub Copilot plans include license management, IP indemnity, organization-wide policy management, and added privacy features. Enterprise customers can customize for his or her codebases and knowledge bases and fine-tune the underlying models, in addition to access Copilot through the Microsoft Copilot on the internet and use Copilot Chat on GitHub.com.
In April, GitHub launched Copilot Workspace, a form of tackle AI-powered software engineering. Workspace provides a dev environment that taps AI-powered agents to assist brainstorm, plan, construct, test and run code in natural language.
Issues with Copilot
Owing to the complex and fraught nature of today’s generative AI tech, Microsoft’s Copilots have their issues.
The models occasionally make mistakes when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to hallucinate, including while summarizing meetings. The Wall Street Journal cited an instance where, for one early adopter using Copilot for Teams meetings, Copilot invented attendees and implied that calls were about subjects that were never actually discussed.
As for GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it could produce insecure coding patterns, bugs, and references to outdated APIs, or idioms reflecting the imperfect code in its training data. The code Copilot suggests won’t all the time compile or run — and even make sense.
Security and privacy concerns loom large over Copilot, as well. But perhaps the elephant within the room is the unresolved fair-use query.
Like most generative AI models, the models powering Microsoft’s Copilots were trained on public data, a few of which is copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Microsoft — amongst others — argues that the fair-use doctrine shields it from copyright claims. But that hasn’t stopped data owners from filing class motion lawsuits against the corporate, GitHub, OpenAI, and plenty of more over what owners allege are clear licensing and IP violations.
Microsoft offers policies to guard certain customers from courtroom battles arising from fair use challenges — at the very least in narrow circumstances. That doesn’t resolve the moral quandary of coaching models on data without permission, nevertheless, which could also be greater than some customers can swallow
