Copilot for everyone - key announcements, Jan 2024

Huge week this week for those wishing to get their hands on Copilot. Of course, Copilot is not a single thing, so in this very brief post, I distinguish between the various versions subject to the announcements, but also touch on some caveats and realities for those wishing to jump in and test.

What is Copilot?

In case you did not know, Copilot is the name Microsoft gave to its various AI companions that will aim to assist with different tasks for different purposes across different aspects of the workflow across various Microsoft applications.

Here is a great diagram from an article by Reed Wiedower on LinkedIn that shows, conceptually, all the various copilots. I have ringfenced the ones that forms the topics in this post and subsequent test drives.

What was announced?

Copilot is now widely available to businesses of all sizes, individuals as well as data professionals. But each version comes with some caveats and realities to just bear in mind if you want to enable it for testing feature and functionality purposes.

I will not in this post delve into features and functionality, as that will be the subject of separate posts (starting soon) after targeted test drives that my team and I are doing across the various versions of this AI companion suite. The first cab off the rank will be test driving Copilot in Fabric for Power BI, followed by several others.

So, what was announced this week?

• Copilot for Microsoft 365, now available to small businesses too (shown in green in the image above).
• Copilot for Microsoft 365, now available to individuals too (shown in red in the image above).
• Copilot for Fabric, now available to data professionals working within that ecosystem (shown in blue in the image above).

Copilot for Microsoft 365, now available to small businesses

Microsoft removed the minimum 300 seat Office 365 E3 or E5 requirement and opened it up to all businesses with Office E3 or E5, or Microsoft 365 for Business Premium or Business Standard. Copilot is therefore now available to businesses of all sizes. Enabling this is reasonably straight forward, but there is a cost reality to bear in mind.

Cost reality: Besides the fact that the licence is an add on to your existing plan (i.e. in addition to Office E3 or E5, or Microsoft 365 for Business Premium or Business Standard), an annual commitment is required. Effectively this means you will commit to US$30 x 12 per user (this equates to US$360 or up to AU$540). There is no trial and no ‘cancel at any time’ option. This just simply means you commit, even of you are only looking to test whether functionality would satisfy your needs or expectations.

Copilot Pro, now available to personal users

Besides Copilot (Free) in Bing, there is now Copilot Pro, which gives you access to GPT-4 Turbo (which simply means that your Copilot in Bing, including DALL-E, gives you accelerated performance), as well as you have Copilot available in the following M365 Apps: Word, Excel (preview and in English only), PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook.

A Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription is required to access Copilot in the aforementioned apps.

Cost is US$20 per user (this equates to AU$30 per user), but no annual commitment is required, and you can cancel at any time, which makes it a lot more friendly to test whether functionality would satisfy your needs or expectations. But there is a catch if you are a business user.

• Catch: As Copilot Pro is an add on to a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, this means that Copilot Pro will not unlock access to Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps if you have a Microsoft 365 Business subscription (i.e. Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Microsoft 365 Apps for Business, Office 365 E3 or Office 365 E5). This is only an issue if the cost reality stated in the previous section, Copilot for Microsoft 365 available to small businesses, is prohibitive and of you merely want to test functionality in apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook.

The diagram below shows the high-level differences between the Copilot Pro vs Copilot for Business versions. Note that Copilot (free) is simply Copilot in BING found here https://copilot.microsoft.com/ .

Copilot for Fabric, now available to data workers within that data analytics ecosystem (Preview)

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now available to Data Engineers and Data Scientists (for Intelligent code completion, routine task automation, and access to industry-standard code templates), Data Integrators using Data Factory (for streamlined data wrangling, and Intelligent code completion), and Power BI Workers (for automatic report creation, report page summary generation, and synonym automation for better Q&A). But there are some realities to bear in mind.

• Cost reality: You need at least an F64 Fabric capacity or at least a P1 Premium capacity. A F64 Fabric capacity, for example costs US$10,300 (which equates to AU$14,700) per month.
• Sovereignty reality: One of the tenancy settings required for Copilot in Fabric to work requires the admin to enable the “Data sent to Azure OpenAI can be processed outside your tenant's geographic region, compliance boundary, or national cloud instance” setting. This setting states that ‘Azure OpenAI is currently available in a limited number of regions and geographies. When this setting is on, data sent to Azure OpenAI can be processed in a region where the service is available, which might be outside your tenant's geographic region, compliance boundary, or national cloud instance.’ So, it is worth bearing this in mind where this setting remains a requirement.

Next steps?

My team and I are working through a test of test drives across Fabric and key Copilots that play within the data analytics domain. More information to follow.