Microsoft is introducing a pay-as-you-go plan for corporate customers that bundles several, but not all, of the corporate's existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365.
The recent plan, Copilot Chat – to not be confused with Microsoft's Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat – is predicated on OpenAI's GPT-4o AI model and allows users to ask business-related questions, create workflow automations, view images generate and more.
All of those features were a part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft's comprehensive enterprise AI add-on for Microsoft 365. However, pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot is stricter. A license costs $30 per user per thirty days.
“Copilot Chat…expands our existing free chat experience for Microsoft 365 business customers to incorporate pay-as-you-go (services),” Microsoft said in a blog post published Wednesday. “Copilot Chat is a robust recent entry point for everybody in (an) organization to develop the AI habit.”
Copilot Chat features can be found within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, a rebrand of the Microsoft 365 app.
Through the app, users can ask Copilot, Microsoft's chatbot experience on top of GPT-4o, to summarize key points in an uploaded file, draft a working document, or create an AI-generated image. Or they will collaborate on a project with teammates and AI using the built-in feature Copilot pages Tool.
Microsoft particularly touts Copilot Chat's task automation features, which it describes as “agentic.”
Using the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Copilot Chat users can launch “agents” to automate basic tasks, corresponding to: For example, providing account details before a sales call or giving instructions to a sales representative. IT administrators can create and manage organization-wide agents and control access and security for individual agents.
Agent pricing will likely be calculated on a “meter-based basis,” Microsoft told TechCrunch. It didn't reveal the rest; We've contacted the corporate for detailed pricing information and can update this text as soon as we hear back.
The Copilot Chat plan lacks lots of the features of Microsoft 365 Copilot, including prebuilt agents and AI-powered features for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Copilot Chat users also won't get the personalization options available to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers, nor those recently introduced by Microsoft Copilot evaluation Tool for measuring company-wide AI usage.
It seems pretty clear that Copilot Chat is Microsoft's try to persuade holdouts to drag the trigger on Microsoft 365 Copilot by discontinuing metered agent features while generating additional revenue from customers with less complex AI needs.
Microsoft 365 Copilot wasn't a house run for the tech giant. After to Business Insider, Copilot, the Microsoft Claims Used by nearly 70% of Fortune 500 corporations, it has proven to be inefficient, costly and insecure for a lot of organizations. Per a youngest According to a Gartner survey, only 3.3% of IT leaders said Copilot provided significant value to their employers.
In one internal memo This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the corporate's focus in 2025 will likely be on “(AI) model-forward applications” that “reshape all application categories.”
“We still have much work to do and an amazing opportunity ahead of us,” Nadella wrote. “The excellent news is that now we have been working on this for greater than two years and have learned loads concerning the systems, app platforms and tools required for the AI era.”
