While Apple is building what it sees as the future with spatial computing and Vision Pro, Microsoft is opening shop at the intersection of work and AI.
That’s the message out of Microsoft Inspire, where the company announced details about new AI-powered subscription services for the enterprise today.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
First up is pricing for Copilot in Microsoft 365, which will cost “$30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers when generally available.”
Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates generative AI with tools for creating Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft 365 Copilot also taps into Outlook and Teams to put “thousands of skills at your command.”
By grounding answers in business data like your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining them with your working context – the meeting you’re in now, the emails you’ve exchanged on a topic, the chats you had last week – Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and more actionable responses to your questions.
This sounds like a fair pitch. If generative AI can actually make businesses more productive, the monthly fee per employee will be a good investment.
Bing Chat Enterprise
Next is a new product called Bing Chat Enterprise. You may have taken a generative AI chatbot in the consumer version of Bing for a test drive, but businesses have different needs. Bing Chat Enterprise leverages the same generative AI technology and puts a data protection spin on things.
[…] Today we’re announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, which gives organizations AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. What goes in – and comes out – remains protected, giving commercial customers managed access to better answers, greater efficiency and new ways to be creative.
Gee, that sounds like the kind of privacy policy you’d want for consumer Bing Chat too. The nondata harvesting version of Bing Chat will go for $5 per user each month starting at some point in the future. Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium and Business Standard licensed organizations will start seeing preview access today.
Subscription Siri
For its part, Apple has singled out its use of trendy AI adoption with a major upgrade to how auto-correct works on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, starting with iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma. Like with machine learning, Apple has leveraged advancements in AI to improve its platforms and not in powering a new service.
Still, Apple’s appetite for subscription revenue can’t be satisfied. You have to wonder what new ideas the company might be cooking up for turning generative AI into a revenue generator. Can you imagine a version of Siri with generative AI so good that people pay monthly for it? If it makes sense, it could make money.
You can read more about Microsoft’s generative AI enterprise announcements from today here.
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