Microsoft is putting a price on the AI-powered future of Office documents, and it’s a steep price for companies looking to adopt the latest Microsoft technology. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers.
That’s a significant premium over what current Microsoft 365 plans cost right now. Microsoft charges businesses $36 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, which includes access to Office apps, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and many other productivity features. The $30 premium for access to Microsoft 365 Copilot will nearly double the cost for businesses participating at E3 that want these AI-powered features. For Microsoft 365 Business Standard, this costs almost three times as much, since it’s $12.50 per user, per month.
Microsoft is trying to overhaul its Office applications with its AI-powered Copilot service, allowing companies to instantly summarize documents, compose emails, and speed up Excel analysis. Microsoft 365 Copilot certainly looks like a very compelling feature addition, and I really think it’s going to change Office documents forever, but the cost could put a lot of Microsoft 365’s existing business off Copilot adoption in the short term.
About 600 enterprise customers have tested Microsoft 365 Copilot through a paid early access program over the past several months. Companies such as KPMG, Lumen and Emirates NBD all have access. “We’re learning that the more customers use Copilot, the more excited they are about Copilot,” Youssef Mahdi, head of consumer marketing at Microsoft, says in a blog post today. “Soon, no one will want to work without it.”
Microsoft hasn’t set a release date for Microsoft 365 Copilot yet, though. The software giant will face competition from Google, too. Microsoft Copilot’s announcement came just days after Google announced similar AI features for Google Workspace earlier this year, including AI-assisted text generation in Gmail, Docs, and more. Zoom and Salesforce have also added AI-powered features, so all eyes will now be on how Google, Zoom, and Salesforce handle pricing for their AI additions going forward.
Part of the reason for the high price of Microsoft 365 Copilot is due to the investment Microsoft is making in building out its AI-powered offering. Microsoft has invested billions in its OpenAI partnership to make all of this a reality. Tech companies like Microsoft have also been scrambling to get Nvidia GPUs to power these features, so there’s a premium to tasks being thrown into that infrastructure until the chip becomes available and costs come down. Microsoft is said to be working on its own AI chips in an effort to avoid costly dependence on Nvidia.
Microsoft is also bringing this Copilot experience to Teams, with integration into the telephony experience from Teams and within Teams threads. You can read more about the new Microsoft Teams Copilot features here.
Besides the pricing announcement, Microsoft is also launching Bing Chat Enterprise. It’s basically the same as Bing Chat available to consumers but with added commercial data protection. Microsoft is releasing a preview today, and it’s included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium. You can read more about Bing Chat Enterprise here.
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