Microsoft to Increase Cost of AI in Office and Safeguard Bing from Data Breaches

In a glimpse of the potential profits it expects to gain from the technology, Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it will increase the cost of accessing new artificial intelligence features in its popular office software by at least 53%.

The company also said it will immediately make a more secure version of its Bing search engine available to businesses to address their privacy concerns, increase interest in artificial intelligence and compete more with Google.

At its Inspire virtual conference, the company said customers would pay $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365’s AI copilot, which promises to draft emails in Outlook, write documents in Word and make virtually all of an employee’s information available. chatbot.

The optional upgrade sits on top of publicly listed monthly plans that range from $12.50 per user to $57, meaning the co-pilot could triple the cost for some Microsoft customers.

In an interview, its vice president Jared Spataro said the tool would pay for itself in time savings and increased productivity. The instructor summarizes, for example, invitations from Teams.

“You don’t take notes in meetings, don’t attend some meetings,” he said. “It just changes the way you work.”

Spataro declined to predict revenue from copilot, which has been tested by at least 600 companies since it was announced in March. AI software, which can be expensive to use, is not yet widely available.

In the meantime, Microsoft is directing businesses to Bing Chat Enterprise, its search engine bot that can create content and understand the Internet and is included in subscriptions used by about 160 million employees.

Unlike public Bing, which has been used by millions of web browsers in recent months, the business version does not allow viewing or recording of user data to train the underlying technology. The employee must log in with work credentials to receive protection.

The rollout comes amid growing industry concern that employees are entering confidential information into public chatbots that could be read by inspectors or repeated by an AI with careful prompting.

When asked if Bing users were unprotected until now, Spataro said Microsoft had made its privacy policy clear and wanted to offer AI to consumers. The company also announced the ability to upload images and search for related content, as Google allows.

The company’s pursuit of Bing could help efforts to grab search advertising share from Google at $2 billion in revenue per percentage point. It can also attract customers to Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI update that provides access to corporate data and compliance controls.

“It’s a very strategic move for us,” Spataro said.