Microsoft has added a “pay-as-you-go” option as part of a new tier for its Copilot assistant for corporate users. The new Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat builds on the traditional free Microsoft 365 Copilot chat experience, alongside offering the ability to use AI agents that can automate repetitive tasks. Microsoft's latest initiative aims to encourage more users to try AI at work, with the hope that companies will pay $30 per month to access the full Microsoft 365 Copilot. Announcing Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Making AI more accessible to every employee in every business. pic.twitter.com/cHD89JuxHz — Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) January 15, 2025 With Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, the company is rebranding what was previously known as Bing Chat Enterprise before it was renamed to just Copilot. M365 Copilot Chat is a chat interface powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 that can find responses from the web and summarise text, and includes features such as Copilot Pages and image generation, along with data protection and IT admin controls at no cost to users. The Copilot Chat allows commercial customers to interact with Copilot, and it works across their Microsoft 365 applications, such as asking for quick summaries from an email thread or getting help preparing for a meeting on their Outlook calendar. However, it now also allows users to create agents. AI agents can act as virtual employees that perform a series of tasks without the need for constant supervision. They are often seen as the next evolution of AI chatbots, and tech companies are rushing to integrate AI agents into apps to create a new type of experience that seamlessly blends into the background. The Microsoft 365 agents can be programmed using natural language in Copilot Agent Builder and Copilot Studio. Both tools are accessible directly within Copilot Chat. "People often mystify agents, but I think of it like creating an Excel spreadsheet," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "Building agents should be as simple as that." Microsoft has been doubling down on AI agents and is pushing hard to get business customers to adopt them. The competition is getting stiff in the enterprise space, especially with Salesforce which has a platform called Agentforce, which allows enterprise organisations to create their own AI agents. Salesforce charges $2 per conversation for its Agentforce AI chat service. Microsoft calculates charges for Copilot Chat based on the "messages" a client uses. This means the cost is determined by the total number of messages used by your organisation, with message usage varying depending on the agent's complexity and the use of specific features. “You can purchase messages though the Copilot Studio meter in Microsoft Azure, a pay-as-you-go option, for $0.01/message, or via pre-paid message packs priced at $200 for 25,000 messages/month,” Microsoft said in a blog post. The number of people using Copilot for Microsoft 365 daily at work nearly doubled quarter over quarter, CEO Satya Nadella said in October, although he did not disclose how many were using it. However, a recent Gartner survey revealed that Microsoft has struggled to convince large numbers of customers to broadly adopt its M365 Copilot due to data security concerns and questions about the value the tool provides.
