The Price of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business: How To Get More Users to Use AI at Work? An Interview with Jared Spataro
Microsoft is relaunching its free Copilot for businesses as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat today, complete with the ability to use AI agents. The latest attempt by Microsoft to get people to be used to using artificial intelligence at work is the Copilot chat, it is aimed at persuading them to pay $30 per month for a full Copilot.
“It’s free and secure AI chat that’s GPT-powered,” explains Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer of AI at work, in an interview with The Verge. “You can upload files so it’s very comparable to the competition, in fact we think even at this level it bests the competition.” Spataro wouldn’t name the competition, but it’s clearly ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
“The first question people ask me is ‘am I writing you a blank check?’” says Spataro, but Microsoft has built controls for how people pay for AI agent access. “The way you can control the spinning of the meters is paying in different ways. Pay-as-you-go is an open account which you can easily use and the other way is through consumption packs, which you can get when you run out.
The pricing and consumption rates are not easy to understand. Classic answers that don’t fit in large language models are priced as one message, whereas generative answers cost two messages and anything accessed from the Microsoft Graph will cost 30 messages.
You can convert a message to 1 cent, 2 cent, and 30 cents by using a number called a message value. A customer’sMACC is burned down by it when theAzure meter spins.
It feels like Microsoft doesn’t have the support of the public to pay an extra $20 a month for Office features, but Microsoft argues that it has always wanted to bring other features to more users.
The price of Microsoft 365 Personal and Home will be raised by $3 per month in the US to allow for Office features to all subscribers. “We are raising the prices of Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for the first time in 12 years,” says Oystryk. We are raising the price in the US by $3 a month, along with similar amounts in other markets.
The Personal Classic and Family Classic are new plans that will only be available for a year. As people go through the renewal cycle, they will be available. If they go to cancel they’ll have the opportunity to pick one of these Personal Classic or Family Classic plans.”
New subscribers will get Office features if they sign up with these plans, and existing subscribers will only be able to get these plans. Microsoft will not have any of its big new features in the classic plans. There will be security updates and minor feature updates, but no new innovations will be part of those plans in the future.
Microsoft is also making it easy to turn off Copilot in Office apps if you simply don’t want the AI assistant or you’re a student and your school has policies against using AI. The feedback we got was that there are times when users want to turn off Copilot. We are working on adding settings to our key applications that will allow people to get rid of Copilot at some point in the future.
