In an effort to attract more paying customers, Microsoft is making its AI assistant available to consumers and smaller businesses through its corporate version.
The software giant from Redmond, Washington, announced in a statement that they are offering a $20/month (about Rs. 1,659) consumer edition of Copilot. This version grants access to the newest ChatGPT technology and image-creation features developed by OpenAI. Users with an Office 365 subscription will have access to Copilot, which can assist with data summarization, question answering, and content creation in Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The 30-subscription requirement for the enterprise service will be eliminated by the corporation, which has been offering a comparable product to major enterprises for $30 per user (about Rs. 2,489 per month).
Even though Microsoft has redesigned almost all of its products to revolve around AI capabilities built on OpenAI technology, Office products are still a great opportunity to charge more for AI support. Azure chief Scott Guthrie compared the current demand to the wait times customers experienced nearly 30 years ago when purchasing Windows 95 software, citing unusually high demand as an example.
Starting in March, Microsoft began testing what is now known as Copilot for Microsoft 365, an Office-based copilot. In November, the business started selling it widely to companies who bought 300 subscriptions or more. According to Jared Spataro, a VP at Microsoft, this rendered the service unavailable to smaller organizations and those wishing to start with a more limited trial.
The demand for Copilot from Microsoft 365 is beyond anything they have ever seen in the commercial market, he added. Small and medium-sized enterprises have put pressure on us like we’ve never seen before, demanding to know why they can’t purchase this. “Maybe we should give it a go.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will appear at the World Economic Forum in Davos and will be interviewed by Bloomberg after the announcement of the new services.
At the same price point as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft’s consumer service Copilot Pro offers comparable features; however, according to Spataro, the product’s connectivity with Office is what sets it apart. The business is planning to launch a building tool that will allow individuals to make their own topic-specific Copilots, a service that is already accessible to businesses; this is in line with what OpenAI introduced last year.
The consumer version and the business version of Microsoft’s privacy standards are different. Unlike corporate customer data, Microsoft plans to save some of the consumer model’s cues and replies for model retraining and product improvement.
