Microsoft's AI-backed Copilot is cool but not really cheap
Microsoft's AI-powered Copilot will make your office work easier, but it will not be cheap. The company has announced that it will charge $30 (around Rs. 2,500) per user every month for using Copilot in Microsoft 365 business plans, including E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium. This cost will be in addition to the existing monthly charges for the above-mentioned packs.
What will be the impact?
Copilot will certainly improve the efficiency of Microsoft Office apps such as Word and Excel. However, its high running costs could deter businesses from using it, at least for now. Currently, Business Standard users in the US have to pay $12.50 per user on a monthly basis. If they want to use Copilot, the package cost will go up by three times.
Microsoft Copilot was announced earlier this year
The Microsoft 365 Copilot was introduced in March this year as a powerful AI-backed productivity tool. It is embedded in apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, and makes meetings in Teams easier. Roughly 600 enterprise customers have been testing Copilot via a paid early access program. However, Microsoft is yet to announce its release date.
How does Copilot work?
In Word, Copilot "writes, edits, summarizes, and creates right alongside people as they work." In PowerPoint, it transforms ideas into a presentation using "natural language commands." Copilot can identify trends and create data visualizations in a "fraction of the time" when used in Excel. It also summarizes data sourced from documents/calendars/notes for Business Chats, and "manages the inbox" in Outlook.
Why is Microsoft making Copilot so costly?
The main reason behind making Copilot so expensive is that Microsoft wants to recover the billions of dollars it spent on developing AI-powered products in association with OpenAI. Microsoft also has to rely on NVIDIA's costly AI chips to power the new features. Until chip availability goes up and the costs go down, Microsoft is unlikely to offer cheaper plans for Copilot.
The commercial version of Bing Chat is now official
Separately, Microsoft has also introduced Bing Chat Enterprise, an improved version of Bing Chat with additional commercial data protection. It is available free of cost to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium users.
