2024-01-16 04:00:00
This is a big step forward for the democratization of generative artificial intelligence. Monday evening, the tech giant made the subscription to Copilot, its equivalent of ChatGPT, accessible to all users of the 365 suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). Powered by OpenAI’s most powerful artificial intelligence model, this assistant can perform all kinds of office tasks: summarize a text, write an email, gather data scattered across different documents, create images, write presentation slides … All, in a few seconds, from a click or a brief instruction from the user. To obtain the enterprise version of the assistant, you have to pay 30 dollars per month in addition to the Microsoft 365 license. The consumer version, Copilot Pro, costs “only” 20 dollars per month [le prix en euros n’est pas encore connu, ndlr] to users of the office suite.
Copilot becomes an assistant for the general public
The first generative AI tool deployed en masse by Microsoft, Copilot has the potential to surpass ChatGPT and its 100 million weekly users, since it will be able to rely on the pool of more than 345 million paying subscribers of the suite 365. Microsoft is making no mistake: to maximize the chances of its tool becoming the number one in generative AI, it is at the same time launching a Copilot application for smartphones. No doubt, the company is indeed targeting the general public.
However, in November, Microsoft reserved the deployment of Copilot for large companies, capable of taking out at least more than 300 subscriptions. The tech giant wanted to ensure that first-time users would have enough resources, both internally and in their ability to call on specialized consultants, to take advantage of Copilot’s potential. The company then explained that it would quickly open access to its tool to smaller companies, which it has just done by lowering the minimum license threshold to zero, and by making Copilot accessible through managed service platforms.
But the arrival of a general public offer seemed distant: Jean-Christophe Dupuy, France director of Microsoft 365, still spoke of Copilot as a strictly BtoB tool when it was launched. With the opening to the BtoC market, Copilot Pro takes Microsoft’s generative AI strategy to another dimension. The tool becomes a direct competitor to ChatGPT and also matches the price of its premium subscription at $20 per month. But unlike the latter, Copilot is linked to the 365 suite and therefore has a whole specific context linked to the different documents present on the user’s account. However, it requires a subscription to Microsoft software.
Is Microsoft stifling OpenAI?
With this new update, Microsoft also allows Copilot users to integrate (and soon, create) “Copilot GPTs”, in other words specific versions of the assistant. For example, a GPT can be dedicated to sport, travel or even cooking. Users are thus faced with a more expert interlocutor, without having to give full context to their assistant when asking their question. OpenAI just deployed this system last week, and here is already its mirror at Microsoft…
More generally, the situation seems strange to say the least between Microsoft and OpenAI, two closely linked partners, the first having invested massively in the second in exchange for exclusivity on its AI models. Their assistants rely on the same models, GPT-4 Turbo (and its older versions) for text and DALL-E 3 for images, which means they compete with the same weapons. But the success of one makes the success of the other since Microsoft pays OpenAI for the use of its models, while OpenAI pays Microsoft for the use of its infrastructure. It remains to be seen whether the two companies can really maintain this “co-opetition” in the long term, or whether Microsoft will gradually stifle OpenAI, whose governance it finally managed to infiltrate following the Altman crisis at the end of 2023.
Either way, Microsoft should hit the jackpot. The sales turnover of the Microsoft 365 suite, filed in the Microsoft Cloud box of its financial results, is estimated at several tens of billions of dollars per year, and this gold mine has grown by more than 18% between 2021 and 2022. Concretely, Copilot 365 could therefore bring tens of billions of additional turnover per year to the company, even if it only converts part of its customers.
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