Microsoft to start selling Microsoft 365 Copilot on November 1

Mary Jo Foley is the Editor in Chief at Directions on Microsoft. Before joining Directions, Mary Jo has worked as... more

Microsoft officials announced at an event in New York City on September 21 that the company will make the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant technology available for purchase by enterprises for $30 per user per month starting November 1. Microsoft 365 Copilot has been in a paid private test with 600 companies since June. There will be not be another beta or preview program before the product hits general availability, officials said.

Microsoft officials also announced the rebranding of some but not all of its various other Copilots that have been announced over the past year. The AI assistants in Windows, Edge and Bing will all simply be called “Microsoft Copilots,” going forward. But Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Dynamics 365 Copilots, Power BI Copilot, and GitHub Copilot will not be renamed to Microsoft Copilot. Even though all of these Copilots from Microsoft use the same underlying architecture, they are built using different reasoning and data and are designed for different purposes.

In other rebranding news, Microsoft officials also said the cross-Office-app AI assistant technology that is built into Microsoft 365 Copilot is being renamed to “Microsoft 365 Chat” instead of “Business Chat.” Microsoft 365 Chat is not a separate product. It is built into the base Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant.

Don’t forget the Microsoft 365 prerequisites

Microsoft 365 Copilot, which Microsoft announced in March 2023, is meant to work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, the new Outlook for Windows (“Monarch”), Loop, OneNote and OneDrive. It will be available for purchase by customers running Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium. Microsoft 365 Copilot will not be available to customers running Office 365 E3 or E5; a move to Microsoft 365 is required as the price for entry, in addition to the $30 per user per month charge for the Copilot itself. There’s no word when or if Microsoft will provide volume discounts for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft has cautioned customers that they need to make sure they have secured any sensitive corporate data in a way that won’t enable leaks of private company information once Microsoft 365 Copilot is implemented. This is no trivial task. Properly secured data means ensuring all users and the security groups are configured for minimal access and all data, especially sensitive data, has access controls defined. Copilots’ ability to access data stores is extensive.

I had heard from some who had seen the private preview of Microsoft 365 Copilot that neither Excel nor PowerPoint were working well (if at all). But a Microsoft official said today that the company had gotten Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint to a more stable, working place within the past two weeks. A number of testers seem to think that the Copilot capabilities in Teams, especially the ability to summarize happenings in meetings, could be the killer application of the Microsoft 365 Copilot technology.

Microsoft execs said this week that they have started privately testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with select consumers and small-business users. The consumer version of Microsoft 365 Copilot is not expected to be available until sometime in 2024. Microsoft officials have not discussed publicly how much the company will charge for Microsoft 365 Copilot for consumers and small businesses.

Copilot for Windows preview arrives soon for Windows 11 users

A preview of Microsoft Copilot for Windows will be available as of September 26 as part of a Windows 11 22H2 Update and will be part of Windows 11 23H2 when it starts rolling out in October 2023. Microsoft execs also said today that previews of Copilots for Paint (called CoCreator, for some reason), Photos, Snipping Tool, and the Shopping feature that is built into Bing and Edge also are coming soon. The Copilot for Windows feature will be on by default, but admins will be able to turn off access using Intune policies or Group Policy.

Copilot isn’t the only feature that will be part of the September 26 Update non-security feature update for Windows 11 22H2. Organizations also will get more passwordless security options. Specifically, they will be able to set a policy that enforces usage of phish-resistant credentials on Entra-joined devices. They also will get support for passkeys that are powered by Windows Hello for Business, giving them passwordless sign-in capabilities like face, fingerprint and/or PIN support on websites that support those features. And two new Windows 365 features will be part of the update, too: Windows 365 Boot and Windows 365 Switch.

Microsoft is expected to start rolling out the Windows 11 23H2 update in October, most likely on Patch Tuesday, October 10, and via the usual staggered release approach.