Big announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2023, pt. 1
New fiscal year has started for Microsoft and traditionally, that has meant some awesome new announcements. This year isn’t an exception to that, and since there are so many new features announced today, I decided to divide them in to a series of posts. Here’s the first one, gathering the first two biggest announcements:
The M365 Copilot pricing
Bing Chat Enterprise
The M365 Copilot pricing
After Microsoft 365 Copilot was published in March 2023, most of the organisations using M365 have been itching to know the answer to this simple question: How much will it cost? Today, we all finally got the answer and it might have been more than many of us expected:
Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for commercial customers for $30/user/month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers.
(I was listening the Inspire keynotes while driving a car and first heard the price to be $3/user/month, causing a spontaneous woo-hoo cheer from me. I was a bit let down when I read the announcement after my drive, although I was not that surprised, I must say 🤨)
Many CFOs may be trying to get their lost breath back at this point, but it kind of makes sense that the price for this kind of helper is not only few bucks per user. When you think about all the time savings and improved productivity it will give to your employees, the price isn’t really that high to pay. In the end, it’s all about the budgeting, right? Make that investment of $360 per year to your employees’ licensing costs and you’ll get it back from better marketing outcomes, increased sales and more innovative & less stressed employees.
With M365 Copilot, you can increase the productivity and efficiency (Microsoft Inspire 2023 keynote)
Let’s have a short recap on what kind of things you can use M365 Copilot for:
Create a visually stunning PowerPoint presentation or SharePoint site based on a Word document
Create a summary of what has been written or spoken in a meeting regarding topic X while you were on holiday
Analyse and create visual charts from the data on Excel
Triage your email and suggest replies on the most urgent messages
Create tasks and reminders based on your meeting notes or any other information in M365
Create a SWOT analysis from internal files and data from the web
Create meeting notes and assign tasks to participants
Create marketing materials based on announcements
Help to prepare for a customer meeting by gathering information and summarising it
… and thousands of other things, that you only need to ask from it.
The only question left unanswered is when, oh when, is the M365 Copilot going to be generally available?!
Bing Chat Enterprise (BCE)
Bing Chat Enterprise is an AI-powered chat for work. If you have tested the Bing Chat, launched in February 2023, the user experience in the Bing Chat Enterprise is pretty much the same, but in addition, there is constantly a clear reminder that your company data is protected. In fact, the whole BCE’s idea is that all the prompts you’ll give with any kind of organisation data, the information will remain protected and is not used to train models. So the BCE is safe to be used even with organisational data. Here’s also a nice video on explaining what the commercial data protection means.
Enterprise AI means protection for your data (Microsoft Inspire 2023 keynote)
It’s also good to understand that the Bing Chat Enterprise won’t be working in the same way as M365 Copilot chat will, so BCE doesn't have access to organizational resources or content within Microsoft 365, such as Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Only content provided in the chat by the user will be used to create the answers, but the BCE can also use the internet to create the answer, when the user asks for example to do a comparison with a competitor’s information (found on the internet).
The BCE is now available for preview and is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium. Your IT admin needs to switch it on, and here’s the instructions on how to do it.
From August 2023 onwards, the Bing Chat Enterprise will be on by default for organisations with the above mentioned licences. For the chat to work, users must sign in with their M365 credentials when using the Bing Chat Enterprise.
The next topics in the series will cover M365 Backup & M365 Archive. Stay tuned!