Pay as you go, Microsoft’s newest Copilot plan for business

Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for Microsoft 365 for enterprise customers that bundles some, but not all, of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity features.

The new plan is Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — Powered by OpenAI GPT-4o It’s an artificial intelligence model that helps users ask business questions, build workflow automations, create images, and more. allows

All these possibilities were part of Microsoft 365 CopilotMicrosoft’s scalable enterprise AI add-on for Microsoft 365. But the pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot is steeper. The license costs $30 per user per month.

“Copilot Chat… adds pay-as-you-go (services) to our existing free chat experience for Microsoft 365 business customers,” Microsoft said in a blog post published Wednesday. “Copilot Chat is a powerful new platform for building the AI ​​habit for everyone in (an) organization.”

Copilot Chat features are available in Microsoft 365 Copilot, the rebranded Microsoft 365 app.

From the app, users can ask Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot experience on top of GPT-4o, to summarize key points in an uploaded file, design a working document, or create an AI-generated illustration. Or, they can collaborate on a project with their teammates and AI through the built-in device Copilot Pages instrument.

Microsoft Copilot highlights Chat’s task automation features and calls it “agent.”

Using Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat users can launch “agents” to automate basic tasks such as providing account details or delivering instructions to a field service representative before a sales meeting. IT admins can create and manage the deployment of agents across the organization, as well as manage access and security for individual agents.

Microsoft told TechCrunch that agents will be priced “on a scaled basis.” He did not reveal more; we’ve reached out to the company for detailed pricing information and will update this article if we hear back.

The Copilot Chat plan lacks many of the features of Microsoft 365 Copilot, including pre-built agents and AI capabilities for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Copilot Chat users also don’t get the customization options available to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers, nor what Microsoft recently introduced. Copilot Analytics a tool to measure company-wide AI usage.

It seems pretty clear that Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s attempt to convince them to pull the trigger on Microsoft 365 Copilot by dropping the agent-sized features, while also generating additional revenue from customers with less complex AI requirements.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is not used at all for the tech giant. according to Business Insider, Copilot from Microsoft claims Used by approximately 70% of Fortune 500 companies, it has proven to be inefficient, expensive, and unreliable for many organizations. per head the end In a Gartner survey, only 3.3% of IT leaders said Copilot provided significant value to their employers.

one internal memo This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company’s focus in 2025 will be “(AI) model-advance applications,” which will “reshape entire application categories.”

“We have a lot of work to do and a great opportunity ahead,” Nadella wrote. “The good news is that we’ve been in this space for over two years and we’ve learned a lot in terms of the systems, application platforms and tools required for the AI ​​era.”