Microsoft is launching a pay-as-you-go plan for corporate customers that bundles together several, but not all, of the company’s existing AI-powered productivity features for Microsoft 365.
The new plan, Copilot Chat — not to be confused with Microsoft’s Copilot Business Chat or GitHub Copilot Chat — is underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model and lets users ask business-related questions, build workflow automations, generate images, and more.
All of these capabilities were a part of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft’s sprawling enterprise AI add-on for Microsoft 365. But pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot is more rigid. A license costs $30 per user per month.
“Copilot Chat … adds pay-as-you-go [services] to our existing free chat experience for Microsoft 365 commercial customers,” Microsoft said in a blog post published Wednesday. “Copilot Chat is a powerful new on-ramp for everyone in [an] organization to build the AI habit.”
Copilot Chat’s features live in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, a rebranding of the Microsoft 365 app.
From the app, users can ask Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot experience on top of GPT-4o, to summarize key points in an uploaded file, draft a work document, or create an AI-generated image. Or, they can collaborate on a project with teammates and AI via the built-in Copilot Pages tool.
Microsoft is particularly touting Copilot Chat’s task automation features, which it describes as “agentic.”
Using the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Copilot Chat users can launch “agents” to automate basic tasks, like giving account details before a sales meeting, or delivering instructions to a field service worker. IT admins can build org-wide agents and manage their deployment, as well as govern the access and security of individual agents.
Agents will be priced on a “metered basis,” Microsoft told TechCrunch. It didn’t reveal more; we’ve reached out to the company for detailed pricing information and will update this article if we hear back.
The Copilot Chat plan lacks many of the features in Microsoft 365 Copilot, including prebuilt agents and AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Copilot Chat users also don’t get the personalization options available to Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers, nor do they get Microsoft’s recently introduced Copilot Analytics tool to measure company-wide AI usage.
It seems fairly clear that Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s attempt to convince holdouts to pull the trigger on Microsoft 365 Copilot by dangling metered agentic features, while at the same time extracting incremental revenue from customers with less complex AI requirements.
Microsoft 365 Copilot hasn’t been a home run for the tech giant. According to Business Insider, Copilot, which Microsoft claims is being used by nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies, is proving to be inefficient, costly, and insecure for many organizations. Per a recent Gartner survey, only 3.3% of IT leaders said that Copilot has provided significant value to their employers.
In an internal memo this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company’s focus in 2025 will be “[AI] model-forward applications” that “reshape all application categories.”
“We have a lot of work to do and a tremendous opportunity ahead,” Nadella wrote. “The good news is that we have been working at this for more than two years, and have learned a lot in terms of the systems, app platform, and tools required for the AI era.”
