Microsoft is launching Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, a repackaged version of its free AI chatbot Copilot. It comes with “AI agents” that are charged per use.
In practice, it is a rebranding of the Bing Chat Enterprise, later renamed Copilot. That chatbot is Microsoft’s version of an AI model that should be able to compete with ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. The most important addition in this new version is AI Agents in the chat itself (which you previously only got if you paid for a Copilot subscription).
Such an agent can be assigned specific tasks, such as managing your inbox or automating actions. In Copilot Studio, you can build and use new agents. You can have them work on web data and your data. Although the chats with the GPT model are free, you have to pay for these agents based on usage. That usage is then measured in the number of messages you send back and forth with the Copilot agent.
The new Copilot Chat is essentially a stripped-down version of Microsoft 365 Copilot and is coming partly to introduce organizations and their employees to the company’s artificial intelligence. In this way, Microsoft also hopes to persuade them to take out a ‘real’ subscription.
However, thirty dollars per month per user appears too expensive for many organizations. Such a full Copilot includes pre-built ‘agents’ and lets you apply all kinds of AI functions in the various 365 programs, such as Teams, Outlook and more.