Microsoft is expanding its AI-powered Copilot feature to Microsoft Teams phone and chat, providing users with real-time summarization and key point generation during calls. Copilot for Teams phone calls will be particularly beneficial for salespeople who need to track important information discussed during client calls. In addition, Copilot in Teams chat will allow users to extract key conversation points from chat threads, making it easier to catch up on missed conversations. Microsoft is currently testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with around 600 customers and plans to launch it more broadly soon. However, the pricing for Copilot is quite steep, with an additional $30 per user per month on top of existing Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
The high price is attributed to Microsoft’s significant investment in building out its AI-powered offerings, including its partnership with OpenAI and the use of Nvidia GPUs. The company aims to revolutionize Office documents by introducing AI capabilities that can instantly summarize documents, generate emails, and expedite Excel analysis. While the features of Microsoft 365 Copilot are compelling, the cost may deter some businesses from adopting it in the short term. Google, Zoom, and Salesforce are also integrating AI-powered features into their offerings, so pricing strategies for AI additions will be closely watched.
In addition to the Copilot pricing announcement, Microsoft has launched Bing Chat Enterprise, a work-specific version of its AI-powered chat feature. Bing Chat Enterprise provides complete, verifiable answers with citations and visual answers such as graphs and charts. The data used for Bing Chat Enterprise is protected, as the tool does not save chat data or use it to train the underlying language model. Microsoft also introduced Visual Search in Bing Chat, allowing users to upload images for similar content search or contextual information.
Furthermore, Microsoft unveiled a new role-based copilot called Sales Copilot, designed for sellers in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. This generative AI assistant assists sellers in creating contextual emails based on Dynamics 365 Sales data, providing summaries before sales meetings, and offering real-time tips during Teams meetings. Sales Copilot is available as a standalone subscription and is included at no additional cost for existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses. Microsoft has combined customer data and customer journey orchestration capabilities within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, allowing enterprises to create contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is priced at $30 per user per month for business accounts, and Bing Chat Enterprise is available in preview for Microsoft 365 customers at no additional cost, with a standalone subscription option of $5 per user per month in the future. The exact release date for Microsoft 365 Copilot has not been announced, but it is expected to become broadly available soon.
You can read the official blog post by Microsoft.
