Microsoft aims to win over more businesses and convince them of its Copilot AI use cases by now offering a free version of its Copilot for businesses called Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
However, the Copilot Chat has the option to add on the use of AI agents — which act as virtual colleagues — in a pay-as-you-go option.
The underlying intention of introducing Copilot Chat is to have those businesses that test those features become more reliant on it, with the ultimate win being them signing up for A$44.9 per month per user for the full Microsoft 365 Copilot plan.
In Copilot Chat, you can upload files and have it summarize Word documents or even analyze data in Excel spreadsheets.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, has the Copilot AI agents tool within the chat interface.
The AI agents can undertake tasks such as client onboarding flows, customer support tasks, and also monitor email inboxes.
The Copilot Chat can therefore be considered as a slimmed-down AI assistant without direct access to organizational data through Microsoft Graph.
The usage of agents with Copilot Chat will will be priced through the Copilot Studio meter in Azure or through a pay-as-you-go option.
The pricing mechanism though is a little complicated. Microsoft measures agent usage in messages, so classic answers that are typically used for predefined responses that are manually authored by agent makers and do not change unless manually updated are priced as one message, whereas generative answers that are based on knowledge sources and are more contextual cost two messages and anything accessing the Microsoft Graph (including files stored in SharePoint) will cost 30 messages.
Microsoft provided an example of the pricing. It noted an example of a hypothetical agent in Copilot Chat using data stored in Microsoft Graph to answer employee questions about HR policies. Considering the agent consumed 200 generative answers and 200 tenant Graph grounding for messages. Therefore, it would cost 6,400 messages or $64 for that day.
Eventually, Microsoft hopes that the costs for companies, weighed against the usefulness of its AI tools, will convince more of them to opt for the full paid version of its Microsoft 365 Copilot business plan.