Microsoft has revealed its plans to introduce a significant price increase for accessing new artificial intelligence features in its popular Office software, aiming to capitalize on the potential benefits of this technology.
During its virtual Inspire conference, Microsoft announced that customers would be charged an additional US$30 ($44) per user, per month to gain access to the AI copilot feature in Microsoft 365. This AI copilot offers functionalities like drafting emails in Outlook, creating documents in Word, and providing employees with easy access to their data through a chatbot.
This premium AI copilot upgrade will be added on top of the existing monthly plans, which range from US$12.50 per user to US$57. Consequently, for some Microsoft customers, the copilot could triple their current costs.
Jared Spataro, the corporate vice president at Microsoft, highlighted the time savings and productivity gains that the AI copilot would bring, such as summarizing Teams calls and reducing the need for note-taking during meetings.
Despite not yet being generally available, at least 600 enterprises have tested the AI copilot since its introduction in March.
In addition to the AI copilot, Microsoft is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a more secure version of its search engine designed for businesses. This bot, which is included with subscriptions used by around 160 million workers, generates content and interprets internet data without compromising user data privacy. Employees must log in with work credentials to ensure data protection.
This move by Microsoft addresses concerns within the industry regarding the use of public chatbots for confidential information, where human reviewers or AI might have access to sensitive data.
Microsoft’s corporate push for Bing, including the ability to upload images and perform related content searches, could help the company compete with Google and potentially gain search advertising market share, which currently stands at US$2 billion in revenue per percentage point gain.
While the new AI features and secure Bing search aim to entice businesses and enhance productivity, the price hike signifies Microsoft’s high expectations for the profitability of AI in its suite of products.
