Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing Revealed

When Microsoft 365 Copilot was announced earlier this year, it generated a lot excitement. And now we know how much it’s going to cost. But will organizations be ready to pay? Plus, all the top news stories from the past week.

Transcript

When Microsoft 365 Copilot was announced earlier this year, it generated a lot of excitement. But now we know how much it’s going to cost. But will organizations be ready to pay? Plus, all of the top news stories from this week. Hello, I’m Russell Smith, Editorial Director of Petri.com and this is This Week in IT.

This week, Microsoft hosted its annual Inspire conference. Now, you of course have probably heard of Build and Ignite. And sometimes Inspire tends to fly under the radar a little bit. And actually, to be honest, until we got a press release this week, I didn’t really know that it was happening. Microsoft finally announced the pricing for its Microsoft 365 Copilot product, which was announced earlier this year. So, Copilot is Clippy on steroids, if you like. So it can do things like summarize documents, create automatic meeting notes, it can generate emails for you, it can analyze data in Excel spreadsheets based on your natural language input, which is something we haven’t really had up until now. There are some features in Excel that do allow some kind of natural language input and can do very basic things, but it’s not as good as what Microsoft has demonstrated in Copilot. But it’s all based on Chat GPT, specifically Chat GPT4.

So this thing is much more powerful than anything that we’ve had in the past. And some of the demonstrations that Microsoft did back earlier this year were really impressive. Now, what’s going on with Copilot right now? Now, there are various different Copilots for different products and ecosystems that Microsoft has. So for instance, there’s one for sales, there’s one for Windows. And we’re talking specifically at the moment about Microsoft 365 Copilot. So this is the system that’s going to be added to apps like Word, Excel, Outlook, you get the idea. Now, this is currently in a public preview, and it’s a paid preview. So you had to be basically invited and you had to pay to get access. And there are about 600 customers in this program at the moment. So the likes of you and I don’t actually have access to it. But of course, when this does become generally available, I’m supposing later this year, the question is, how much is it actually going to cost? So that is what was announced this week. And while in the press release, Microsoft didn’t really say too much about the actual cost. They said, well, we’re just going to announce the pricing at Inspire.

They did actually say that it’s going to cost $30 per user. So that’s quite a hefty sum to put on this. You know, if you consider that people who are subscribing to things like Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium are paying under $20 a month per user, maybe something like $12 or $13, something in that ballpark range, to then ask an extra $30 to get access to Copilot is a pretty big ask. And that’s going to double the subscription price per user for people who are on something like an E3 or E5 subscription already, because obviously they’re a lot more expensive. So what is behind the pricing? Why so much? Well, of course, the first thing is that Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI and they need to get their return on investment. They need to get their money back. So this thing was never likely to be cheap. Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI, the company behind Chat GPT, which Copilot is based on. So they need to get their money back. They need to see a return on this investment. And if Copilot lives up to the demos that we saw earlier this year, then maybe it’s worth the price tag. But Microsoft isn’t the only player in this market. We’ve got products coming out from Google.

Recently announced this week is that Apple, working on their own version of Chat GPT called Ajax. Now, there have been various internal disputes at Apple about how to position this and how this technology might be integrated, I suppose, into Apple’s products. Adobe also working on their own AI, Canva. There are lots of players in this market. So it’s going to be interesting to see how all of these new products are also priced and if Microsoft can compete. Now, if you’re already in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, then the chances are, I suppose, that Microsoft is just going to bet, well, people are going to cough up $30 because they’re not going to change to Google or to Canva or to whatever other alternatives there are to Microsoft 365 because it’s just too painful once you’re in that ecosystem. People are just going to pay and we’re going to make it worth it. Well, let’s see whether the product actually lives up to expectations. Imagine if Google priced their product at $15 per user. Would that cause a massive exodus from Microsoft 365?

I don’t think so, actually. The question is, can you afford not to have this? The potential for Copilot to really boost productivity to levels that we haven’t seen since the advent potentially of the word processor and things like Access and Excel is so great that I think the organizations will not be able to afford not to pay for this. And probably that’s the bet that Microsoft is making at this high price point. But it’ll be really interesting to see how this plays out over the coming months as competitors start to announce their pricing, too. So let me know what you think. Is $30 way too much for Copilot? Or is this something that organizations are just not going to be able to live without? Please let me know what you think about it in the comments below. It’s been a really busy week for the IT enterprise news.

Bing Enterprise Chat

So another announcement that came out of Inspire is that Bing Enterprise Chat is now a thing. So we had Bing Chat, which we’ve covered on this channel a couple of times, which is basically Microsoft’s extension to its search engine that provides that natural language capability. Again, it’s based on Chat GPT with some augmented features, with an orchestrator feature that allows it to pull out information that’s current as well, which is something that Chat GPT can’t do. Now, Bing Enterprise Chat is basically the same thing, but with extra protections for data privacy to make sure that commercial data stays private and that isn’t leaked out into places where it shouldn’t be. Now, this is coming at no extra cost to organizations that have a business or an enterprise plan on Microsoft 365. So the pricing of this quite different to Copilot.

Microsoft partners with Meta bringing Llama 2 to Azure

In more AI news, Microsoft and Meta announced a partnership to bring Meta’s Llama 2 large language model to Azure as a product that you can buy in the Azure marketplace. Now, Llama 2 is basically a language model similar to Chat GPT that’s designed specifically for commercial purposes, something that you might use to enable chat bots on your site, for instance, that kind of thing. So now this partnership has been officially announced, and it’s a really interesting development because you’d think it’s something that maybe Microsoft wouldn’t want to have on their Azure platform, as obviously Meta is a competitor to Microsoft, but no, Microsoft is making this available for everybody on Azure as well.

Windows Server Hotpatch now available with Desktop Experience

Windows Server Hotpatch. Now, this is something that you can only do in VMs that are running on Azure. So it has to be a Windows Server Azure Edition VM. And up until this week, you were only able to do it on VMs that were running the Server Core experience. So essentially, there was no desktop GUI on those devices. But now, Windows Server Hotpatch is generally available for Windows Server VMs that also have the desktop experience installed. So just a quick reminder that Hotpatch is basically a new feature, well, it’s not new, it’s probably a couple of years old already, that allows you to basically apply security patches to a device without a reboot for a certain length of time.

Windows 11 version 23H2

Windows 11 version 23H2, which will be available sometime this fall, will be released without you needing to do a full reinstall of the operating system. So that’s really good for IT administrators. That’s going to make it easier to roll out. And I suspect that probably means that we’re not going to see any major updates to the Windows kernel in this release. Edge workspaces are now generally available for enterprise customers.

Microsoft Edge Workspaces generally available for Enterprise customers

Now, I really love this feature. I think it really sets it apart from Google Chrome. And I talked about this a couple of videos back. I’ll put a link on the screen so that you can check out that video. But basically, what it allows you to do is to group websites together and roll them out to your users in a tab group and basically manage that whole process for users. It sounds like something not really very mind-blowing in terms of a feature, but sometimes it’s the simple things that really make a difference to people’s productivity. And I’ve started using it recently, and it really helps me to organize all the websites that I might need to access to complete a particular project.

Sales Copilot generally available

And back to Inspire quickly, Microsoft announced this week that Sales Copilot is now generally available. So this is something that you get for free if you already have a Dynamics Enterprise or Premium subscription.

Microsoft Message Center – Teams Shared Channels

So let’s head over to the Microsoft 365 Message Center quickly. And this week, Microsoft announced a new feature that’s going to help users set up shared channels in Teams. So just a quick reminder, a shared channel is a channel that you can give access to a group of people in another organization. So instead of having to add individual guest users, you can add an entire organization and a group of people from that organization will get access. Now, the problem with this is that it can be quite difficult to set up. You have to set up various trusts, so your IT administrator has to set up those trusts in order for the whole experience to work. Now, what Microsoft has added is the ability to notify users and to take users through some of the steps that are required to make this whole experience work and to direct them, “Well, you need to do this. You need to ask your IT administrators to do this,” rather than just getting some cryptic error message or you set it up and, “Well, it just doesn’t work.” Now, I’ve been through this experience recently and it’s a little bit complex to set up. It’s not easy. So this is a great step forward in helping to make this feature seem like it actually works because quite often with these things that are really complicated on the backend, it can be frustrating, especially for the end user, when they get all these cryptic error messages and even for IT people who need to follow through all of these steps to make sure these things work. So that is rolling out to a tenant near you soon.

Windows Insider Program – Windows Copilot

And some news this week for Windows Insiders. So all dev channel Windows Insiders now have access to Windows Copilot. So this is the Copilot that’s going to help you do things in Windows. So I don’t know, you could say, I don’t know, you want to set your machine up for development and it will go and check all the settings automatically for you to make that happen, that kind of thing. And the new Outlook experience, the Monarch client, is now also available to all users on the dev channel. I really hate this thing about the new Outlook client. There are various ways to get access to it as far as I understand. You have to be on a particular channel in the office program or now it’s the Windows Insider program. So I’d like to check it out, but I’m just not sure how to do it. I’m not going to go on to the dev channel in the Insider program, but there are other ways to get it as well. But anyway, if you’re on the dev channel, you now get that new Outlook experience by default.

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