“It’s about unleashing a swarm of intelligent agents to supercharge your productivity and unlock the full ROI of AI,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.
The move comes as generative AI vendors experiment with different payment models for their GenAI wares. The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s M365 Copilot is $30 per user, per license, but it also offers the consumption-based Security Copilot GenAI tool, which comes to $4 an hour per provisioned stock-keeping unit (SKU).
Competitors such as Salesforce have tried other pricing models such as a $2 per conversation starting price for Agentforce, while Amazon has options for on-demand and batch pricing or provisioned throughput for its Bedrock foundation models offering.
[RELATED: Microsoft Copilot, Copilot+ PC, Windows 11 AI Updates Start Rolling Out]
M365 Copilot Products
CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
Wayne Roye, CEO of Staten Island, N.Y.-based Microsoft partner Troinet, told CRN in an interview that Microsoft AI is the biggest, most exciting part of the portfolio this year.
Roye said that Microsoft would be a help to his business by continuing to get the word out on how AI can improve business functions and how it will change the work required of a variety of job roles.
“AI is going to affect so many things, change so many functions and accelerate the speed of growth of a lot of organizations if they really address it the right way,” Roye said. “Creative people will strive and survive with AI. … If you’re the person that all you do is hit a button all day long with no thought, AI is going to do that for you. But if you’re the guy that’s now thinking through and ideating on how these buttons now actually create something great, that person is going to accelerate and make more money.”
In a post to Microsoft-owned social network LinkedIn, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Chat “a big step forward in making AI accessible to every employee in every business.”
“It’s not just about having access to Copilot,” Nadella said. “It’s about unleashing a swarm of intelligent agents to supercharge your productivity and unlock the full ROI of AI.”
He indicated that Chat can help demystify AI agents for users, comparing them to the simplicity of “creating an Excel spreadsheet.”
M365 Copilot Chat is powered by GPT-4o, the flagship AI model by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Chat includes enterprise data protection, agent management and other IT controls, Jared Spataro, Microsoft chief marketing officer for AI at work, said in a blog post Wednesday.
Microsoft customers will likely use a mix of consumption-based Copilot Chat and license-based M365 Copilot, Spataro said. Agents are accessible by PC, tablet, mobile and other devices. They are built by users adding an agent’s name, instructions and where it gets its information (“knowledge”). Chat will warn users if the agent is accessing a source not available to certain people in an organization.
“These announcements enable every customer to accelerate their AI transformation and realize enterprise-wide ROI,” he said. “Now, every employee has a Copilot and a team of agents to scale their impact.”
The two offerings have some key differences. Consumption-based M365 Copilot Chat does not include a variety of features included with license-based M365 Copilot. Missing from Chat are:
- Copilot in Teams, in Outlook, in Word, in Excel and in PowerPoint
- The ability to ground Chat in work data in a tenant’s Microsoft Graph and third-party data with Graph connectors–users still have access to web grounding powered by GPT-4o.
- SharePoint Advanced Management
- Pre-built reports and advanced analytics for measuring return on investment (ROI)
While license-based M365 Copilot includes an offer for agents grounded in work data–which includes content from meetings, emails, documents, chats and more–this is a metered offering in consumption-based M365 Copilot Chat, according to Microsoft. Both the consumption-based offer and license-based offer use metering for agents that act independently of users with autonomous actions.
Although consumption-based M365 Copilot Chat doesn’t include Copilot Analytics for measuring usage and adoption, it does have basic reporting in the Microsoft Admin Center available, according to Microsoft.
Features in preview for M365 Copilot include Copilot Actions and pre-built M365 agents–including interpreter, facilitator, project manager and employee self-service agents.
The new consumption-based Chat offer allows for a limited number of file uploads of any documents for Copilot to then summarize, analyze and suggest improvements, among other AI-powered actions.
Copilot Pages allow users to collaborate with colleagues on projects in real time, bringing in content from Copilot, files and the web.
Examples of agents Chat users might create include a customer relationship management (CRM) agent for fetching account details before a customer meeting and field service agents that can surface instructions and product information stored in a user’s SharePoint.
IT administrators can build organization-wide agents and manage the deployment, according to the tech giant.
The Chat announcement follows Microsoft’s unveiling of its new “CoreAI – Platform and Tools” division, headed up by Facebook’s former head of engineering, Jay Parikh.
