Microsoft to charge more for AI in office, secure Bing from leaks

Microsoft said on Tuesday it will charge at least 53% more for access to new artificial intelligence features in its widely used office software, in a glimpse of the windfall it hopes to reap from the technology.

The company also said it would immediately make a safer version of its Bing search engine available to businesses, aiming to address their data protection concerns, increase their interest in artificial intelligence and compete more closely with Google.

At its Inspire virtual conference, the company said customers will pay $30 per user per month for an AI co-pilot in Microsoft 365, which promises to craft emails in Outlook, pen documents in Word and make nearly all employee data accessible via a prompt from a chatbot. .

The voluntary upgrade comes on top of publicly listed monthly plans that range from $12.50 per user to $57, which means Copilot could triple costs for some Microsoft customers.

In an interview, Jared Spataro, vice president of the company, said the tool would pay for itself with time savings and productivity gains. The copilot summarizes Teams calls, for example.

“You don’t take notes at meetings anymore,” he said, “and you don’t attend some meetings.” “It just changes the way you work.” Spataro declined to forecast revenue from the co-pilot, which has tested at least 600 companies since it was unveiled in March. Artificial intelligence software, potentially costly to run, is not yet generally available.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is directing companies to Bing Chat Enterprise, a bot in its search engine that can create content and make sense of the Internet, including subscriptions used by about 160 million workers.

Unlike the generic Bing that millions of web surfers have gained access to in recent months, the enterprise version will not allow any viewing or saving of user data to train the underlying technology. The employee will have to sign in with work credentials to get the protection.

The release follows growing industry concern about employees entering confidential information into public chatbots, which human reviewers could read or an AI could reproduce with a careful prompt.

Asked if Bing users were not yet protected, Spataro said Microsoft had made its privacy policies clear and was eager to make AI available to consumers. The company also announced the ability to upload images and search related content, as allowed by Google.

The company’s push for Bing could help efforts to wrest search advertising share from Google at $2 billion in revenue per percentage point. It could also entice customers to Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI upgrade that provides access to business data and compliance controls.