Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat will be the bait that leads more businesses to trust and pay for AI.
Today Microsoft is bringing its free Copilot for companies back as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with AI agents. Microsoft is trying to get consumers used enough to the artificial intelligence at work and accustomed enough to rely on it to spend $30 a month for the full Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s newest move to persuade consumers that AI is their new way of working.
It’s safe and free AI chat, powered by GPT,” Microsoft’s chief marketing officer of AI at work Jared Spataro told The Verge. ‘You can upload files so that’s very similar to the competition, in fact we think even at this point it’s better than the competition.’ Spataro didn’t give his name to the competition, but obviously it’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is really just the renaming of Bing Chat Enterprise and before Microsoft rebranded it into just Copilot. It is importantly, now includes Copilot AI agents within the chat console — previously just in the full Microsoft 365 Copilot experience — at a cost of $30 per user, per month. These agents are set up to function as online counterparts, and can-do everything from check inboxes of emails to automate a workflow.
Agents that are based on web data will be available to create and deploy with Copilot Studio, or web-data based agents (and even work-data based agents with the Microsoft graph). Agent uses with Copilot Chat will be charged by the Copilot Studio meter in Azure or by a pay-as-you-go model.
‘I get the very first line [people are saying] ‘am I writing you a blank check?’’ says Spataro, but Microsoft has implemented systems that manage who pay for AI agent access. ‘This control you have over the motion of the meter spins, that’s paying. You have pay-as-you-gone, which is just like an open account or tab that you’re burning down, but also you can do it via consumption packs, and once the pack is up, you’re done”.
The price and consumption rates are a bit tangled though. Microsoft counts agent time in messages, therefore traditional answers not hitting large language models cost one message, generative answers two messages, and anything calling the Microsoft graph (even files in SharePoint) 30 messages.
“A message is 1 cent so you basically can make it into 1 cent, 2 cents, 30 cents,” Spataro says. “It spins an Azure meter and it snuffs a customer’s MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment).
Microsoft has some suggestions for cost-calculating for companies who may be tempted to deploy AI agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat:
It doesn’t do much different to the real-life chat in Copilot Chat, and queries are done with GPT-4o. You can even share files to Copilot Chat and have it summarised Word files or even Excel tables. The same thing will do from Word or Excel as well if you purchase the full Microsoft 365 Copilot instead of uploading files one by one. Microsoft, Spataro adds, is not interested in providing a trial mode of Microsoft 365 Copilot, but Copilot Chat is obviously there to lure companies to pay to enable Copilot in Office apps.
Copilot Chat is already popular among companies using Microsoft software and services. “We had Bing Chat Enterprise that we renamed, and the naming process has been kind of lost and we can’t find the product, but we have thousands of people using it,” Spataro says. “What we find is that once you get started using it, you get used to it and recognize how valuable it can be at work.”
With the debate over the importance of a $30 per user, per month Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription in the air, Microsoft will be betting that Copilot Chat will convert a lot more companies to its AI thinking.
