Microsoft now offers a paid Copilot Pro subscription for consumers and is dramatically expanding the availability of Microsoft 365 for commercial customers. Additionally, the software giant is bringing Copilot customization via GPTs, adding Copilot to the Microsoft 365 mobile app, and it has finally acknowledged the Copilot apps it quietly shipped in December for Android and iPhone.
“We’re delighted to announce more options for power users, creators and anyone looking to take their Copilot experience to the next level,” Microsoft executive vice president Yusuf Mehdi writes in the announcement post. “This begins with the introduction of Copilot Pro, a new premium subscription for individuals that provides a higher tier of service for AI capabilities, brings Copilot AI capabilities to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, and new capabilities, such as the ability to create Copilot GPTs. We are also announcing the general availability of our Copilot app for iOS and Android phones. Finally, we’re excited to bring Copilot for Microsoft 365 to more commercial customers by expanding the availability to businesses of all sizes, including small- and medium-sized businesses, starting today.”
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Copilot Pro costs $20 per user per month, and it adds Copilot capabilities to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on the PC, Mac and iPad for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, priority access to the latest models (stating today with OpenAI ChatGPT-4 Turbo), enhanced AI image creation capabilities (including, finally, landscape orientation) and performance with Image Creator from Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator), and, coming soon, the ability to build your own custom Copilot GPT using a new Copilot GPT Builder tool. (More on that below.)
Copilot Pro is currently available in Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, The United Kingdom, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States. It supports English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Microsoft says it will make Copilot Pro available in more markets and in more languages “soon.”
Copilot for Microsoft 365 controversially launched only for Microsoft’s biggest corporate customers in November, but the software giant is now expanding the service—which costs $30 per user per month for those businesses with 300 or fewer employees—to all commercial customers, including small businesses with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard licenses. There are no more seat minimum requirements, either, and businesses can purchase the Copilot add-on through solution providers partners too if desired.
And in addition to the already-available standalone Copilot mobile apps and the new Copilot capability in the Microsoft 365, Microsoft has also announced Copilot GPTs, which let customers customize the behavior of Microsoft Copilot on a topic that is of particular interest to you.
“A handful of Copilot GPTs will start to roll out beginning today with specific purposes such as fitness, travel, cooking and more,” Mehdi says. “Soon, Copilot Pro users will also be able to create their own Copilot GPTs using Copilot GPT Builder. Stay tuned for more on this experience as we get closer to availability.” This is smart: Copilot, like ChatGPT, seems to go off the rails more when the data set it works with is too big. It’s possible/likely that limiting how Copilot works will actually improve its reliability and usability.
Whew. Lots to digest here.