Microsoft on Tuesday said it would charge at least 53 percent more to access new artificial intelligence features in its widely used office software, in a glimpse at the windfall it hopes to reap from the technology.
The company also said it would make a more secure version of
its Bing search engine available immediately to businesses, aiming to address
their data-protection concerns, grow their interest in AI and compete more with
Google.
At its virtual Inspire conference, the company said
customers would pay $30 per user, per month for its AI copilot in Microsoft
365, which promises to draft emails in Outlook, pen documents in Word and make
virtually all an employee's data accessible via the prompt of a chatbot.
The voluntary upgrade is on top of publicly listed, monthly
plans ranging from $12.50 per user to $57, meaning the copilot could triple
costs for some Microsoft customers.
In an interview, Jared Spataro, its corporate vice
president, said the tool would pay for itself through time savings and
productivity gains. The copilot summarizes Teams calls, for instance.
"You don't take notes in meetings anymore, don't attend
some meetings," he said. "It just changes the way you work."
Spataro declined to forecast revenue from copilot, which at
least 600 enterprises have tested since its March unveiling. The AI program,
potentially expensive to operate, is not yet generally available.
In the meantime, Microsoft is pointing businesses to Bing
Chat Enterprise, a bot in its search engine that can generate content and make
sense of the internet, included with subscriptions used by some 160 million
workers.
Unlike the public Bing that millions of web surfers have
accessed in recent months, the enterprise version will not allow any viewing or
saving of user data to train underlying technology. An employee would have to
log in with work credentials to gain the protections.
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The rollout follows growing industry concern about staffers
entering confidential information into public chatbots, which human reviewers
could read or AI could reproduce with careful prompting.
Asked if Bing users were unprotected until now, Spataro said
Microsoft had made its privacy policies clear and was eager to bring AI to
consumers. The company also announced the ability to upload images and
search-related content, like Google allows.
Its corporate push for Bing may aid efforts to wrest search
advertising share from Google at $2 billion in revenue per percentage point
gain. It may also draw customers to Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI upgrade giving
access to business data and compliance controls.
"It's a very strategic move for us," Spataro said.
© Reuters