Microsoft has gone all-in on AI, for both its customers and enterprise partners, releasing its Copilot feature for business customers locally. Juha Saarinen explains

Microsoft 365 business customers in New Zealand are now able to add Copilot artificial intelligence to two Office productivity suites.

Pricing for Copilot is set at $48.50 per user per month, with GST on top.

This is roughly the same as in the United States, where Copilot costs US$30 per user per month, with an annual commitment required.

Copilot is available for Microsoft 365 Business Standard that costs $20.20 per user and month, and the $35.60 per user and month Business Premium edition. It is also available for the Enterprise E3 and E5 licences, and Office 365 E3 and E5.

Microsoft does not advertise Copilot for its entry-level Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Apps for business versions. Nor is Copilot available for Microsoft 365 Family and Personal subscriptions that are aimed at home users.

Copilot is based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) version 4 from Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence company OpenAI during non-peak times.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 provides an AI chatbot that can access organisational graphs securely, and is integrated in Office apps such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. It also provides the ability to create AI images through the DALL-E 3 model and Designer, which used to be called Bing Image Creator.

Users can also build their own Copilots with the $323.60 plus GST Copilot Studio that allows for 25,000 messages a month. Copilot Studio can create, test and publish copilots and GPTs for Microsoft 365 using natural language.

Available separately, Microsoft is also intending to launch a $37 per user per month version plus GST called Copilot Pro that gives priority access to the GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo generative AIs during peak times.

Copilot Pro is available on the web, on Microsoft Windows, and for Apple macOS and iPadOS.

For those curious about what Copilot can do, Microsoft provides a free version to try out.

Microsoft has gone all-in on AI, for both its customers and enterprise partners like Visa, BP, Honda, Pfizer, Accenture, PwC and KPMG.

The tech giant even retired the Cortana personal digital assistant in Windows last year in favour of Copilot. Earlier this month, Microsoft said a Copilot key for Windows 11 PCs, debuting on systems displayed at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

The bet on AI appears to be paying off for Microsoft, which this week trounced Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with a market capitalisation of US$2.887 trillion.