Counting Copilots: And Why it Matters

微软 has released numerous generative AI-powered Microsoft Copilot s.

Understanding your choices of Copilots, their respective capabilities, and prices is important in order to best match licenses with user requirements.

This article summarizes and builds on a recent article I published on No Jitter, "Your Guide to Piloting Microsoft Copilot". I'd encourage you to start by reading the No Jitter article and then returning here.

No One Knows How Many Microsoft Copilots There Are

While it may sound unbelievable, I suggest that no one at Microsoft knows how many Copilots there currently are. The challenge is that Copilot refers to both separate products which require incremental licensing and specific features or capabilities within products.

In November 2023, Satya Nadella , Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, announced, "“We are the Copilot company. We believe in a future where there will be a Copilot for everyone and everything you do.”

After that, every product manager at Microsoft raced to add a Copilot feature or Copilot SKU (stock keeping unit) to their product or product line.

During my March 2024 session at Enterprise Connect (#EC24) I suggested there were at least 11 major Copilots. (My session focused primarily on Copilot for M365 and Microsoft Teams. Message me if you want a copy of my slides.)

1 - Copilot for Github - the OG. Released in 2021, according to Microsoft, the Github Copilot has been adopted by over 37,000 organizations, including a third of the Fortune 500. Copilot for Github focuses entirely on speeding up and improving software development.

Free for teachers and students, Copilot for Github paid plans start at $10/month for individuals, and are $19/user/month for businesses, and $39/user/month for enterprises.

Unlike most other newer Copilots, because Copilot for Github has been available for years, there is a significant amount of quantitative statistics around its efficacy:

• Users accept nearly 30% of code suggestions from GitHub Copilot; and notably over time the acceptance rate for Copilot suggestions increases.
• Less experienced developers have a greater advantage with tools like GitHub Copilot.
• Developers who used GitHub Copilot completed a test task significantly 55% faster.
• Between 60–75% of users reported feeling less frustrated when coding when using GitHub Copilot.

2 - Microsoft Copilot (formerly known as “Bing Chat”) – a free version of Copilot available in Edge or Chrome browsers. Unlike search engines, Copilot summarizes results from multiple sources into a single natural language response. You ask questions of Copilot as if talking to a person, and you then ask follow-up questions as required. Copilot is also available as a free mobile app, for both Apple and Android devices. The mobile app makes taking a picture of an object or scene easy to ask questions about specific visual images, in addition to supporting voice or text-based questions. (Note that without signing into to a Microsoft account you can currently only ask Copilot 5 questions per day.)

3 - Copilot in Windows – refers to a collection of AI-powered features included in Windows 11 (some Copilot features are also available in Windows 10). This includes the ability to access Copilot by using the Windows key+C key combination. Copilot in Windows is still considered in preview and is only available in specific global markets.

4 - Copilot for Microsoft 365 – the primary Copilot many business users will consider. This Copilot is integrated directly into Teams, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and other Microsoft 365 apps. Copilot for M365 inherits the security, compliance, and privacy policies you’ve set up in Microsoft 365 and your data never leaves its secure partition and is never used for training purposes. With Copilot for M365, answers are anchored in your business context and grounded using your business content. Copilot for M365 is priced at $30/user/month as an add-on to any M365 E3, E5, A3, A5, M365 Business Standard, or M365 Business Premium license (or a newer version of these suites that no longer includes Microsoft Teams). An annual commitment is required, so it is really $360/user/year.

5 - Copilot Pro – designed for individuals with a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription. Copilot Pro provides capabilities integrated with Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, notably not Teams (these plans do not include the work version of Teams). Copilot Pro also provides priority access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo during peak times, along with 100 boosts to create faster images using Designer (which is powered by DALLE 3). Copilot Pro is priced at $20/user/month, and you don't need to commit to a full year.

6 - Copilot for Viva – Microsoft has been adding Copilot capabilities to the various Viva modules. At present these capabilities are still in preview and a separate license, beyond the Viva licensing, is not required to enable these features. Administrators can enable Copilot in the Viva admin center(s). The Microsoft 365 Community Conference happening at the end of April in Orlando will likely provide lots more details.

7 - Copilot for Sales – This Copilot is designed to connect to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to provide sales insights and AI-enable sales workflows. This Copilot is available for $50/user/month (which includes Copilot for M365) or as a $20/user/month add-on for users who already have Copilot for M365; an annual commitment is required.

8 - Copilot for Services – Focused on contact center agents, Copilot for Service can help summarize customer conversations, generate answers from knowledge base articles or other documentation, and can assist creating post-call notes. Out-of-the-box integrations are provided for Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. You can also integrate it with your existing website, files, and other data sources. Copilot for Service is priced the same as Copilot for Sales, $50/user/month or as a $20/user/month add-on for users who already have Copilot M365; an annual commitment is required.

9 - Copilot for Finance - Focused on optimizing financial processes including reconciliations, variance analysis, and generating insights and visuals related to financial data. Copilot for Finance is currently in preview. This Copilot was announced in late February without details related to pricing or general availability. I would expect this Copilot to have per user pricing similar to Copilot for Services or Sales.

10 - Copilot for Security – Generally available as of April 1, 2024, Copilot for Security is designed to help security professionals keep organizations safe by leveraging the power of AI . This Copilot is priced based on provisioning Azure Security Compute Units (SCUs) at a cost of $4/hr; with Microsoft recommending provisioning 3 SCUs to start, this would cost an organization just under $9,000/month.

11 - DAX Copilot – based on the Nuance acquisition and a repackaging, and extension of Nuance's Dragon Medical One which is decribed as a conversational AI workflow assistant and documentation companion. This Copilot is focused on helping clinicians in the healthcare setting document patient interactions. Pricing is not directly available but is in the range of hundreds of dollars per seat per month.

Even More Copilots

I suggested there were 11 Copilots but other EC24 attendees were quick to point out ...

Copilot Studio - which is a tool that allows you to customize and extend Copilot for Microsoft 365 and create conversational copilots that can service customers and employees across multiple channels. Copilot Studio is available as part of a free pilot and is priced at $200/25,000 messages/month.

Copilot for Power Platform - represents a number of AI features within the toolset (Power Platform) that helps create customized workflows, chatbots, and other applications. Licensing is complicated.

There is also ...

Copilot for Azure - described as "a preview product from Microsoft that integrates generative AI to assist users in designing, operating, optimizing, and troubleshooting cloud and edge solutions." Copilot for Azure is offered at no additional cost during the preview with final pricing to be determined later.

So, maybe there are 14 Copilots (?).

"For" versus "In"

While not consistently applied, Microsoft has often used the "Copilot for X" pattern to denote a separately licensed genAI add-on and "Copilot in Y" to denote a genAI feature.

If you decided to try and count the Copilots that are "in" the list gets much longer: Copilot in Word, Copilot in PowerPoint, Copilot in OneNote, Copilot in Outlook, Copilot in Excel, Copilot in Teams.

And then there are times when they use both, for example "Microsoft Copilot for Azure in Cosmos DB (preview)".

Or neither, in the case of Cocreator that can be used in Paint to generate AI art. (I feel this product team had one job, add "Copilot" to their product, and they failed by naming this genAI capability "Cocreator" ??.)

Copilot Confusion

If you have made it this far, thank you. If you are a little confused, join the club.

Microsoft is quickly pushing out Copilot features or add-on licenses for every product; I suggest they are moving a tad too quickly and also diluting Nadella's "democratization of AI" vision, by creating a large number of add-on licenses. (In contrast both Zoom and 网迅 are including their AI Companion / AI Assistant capabilities for no additional charge; granted, the scope of Microsoft's AI tools is much broader.)

What Does It All Mean and What Should you Do?

I believe Copilot (generative AI) features added to the Microsoft suite of products will unlock significant value for specific user groups and use cases.

During the balance of 2024, I would suggest experimenting with the Copilots in your organization where you have a group that is interested and willing to provide both quantitative and qualititative feedback.

The objective should be to be able to build a concrete business case for specific Copilots (that includes investment in required licenses, along with necessary IT and end-user training, and the supporting communications and change management) ahead of your 2025 budget cycle.

Copilots can provide tremendous value but only if you are able to take off.

If you need help decoding and understanding all of the Microsoft Copilot documentation (some up-to-date, some out-of-date!) or would like assistant executing a Copilot pilot program, feel free to reach out to me.

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