Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, speaks during an interview in Redmond, Washington, March 15, 2023.
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Microsoft shares rose as much as 5.8% Tuesday after the company announced a new artificial intelligence subscription service for Microsoft 365. The company will charge users an additional $30 per month for the use of generative AI with tools such as Teams, Excel and Word.
Adding on the subscription to Copilot, a generative AI assistant that works across Microsoft 365 programs, could increase monthly prices for enterprise customers as much as 83%. Copilot’s capabilities include ranking incoming emails, summarizing meetings, analyzing spreadsheet data, offering writing prompts and designing presentations, according to Microsoft.
The updates come as the race to offer consumer-driven generative AI tools heats up among tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and more.
“It’s grounded in your business data in the Microsoft Graph — that’s all your emails, calendar, chats, documents and more,” Microsoft wrote in a release, adding that the tool abides by a user’s preset security, privacy and compliance policies for Microsoft 365.
The tool is currently in early testing stages with 600 enterprise customers, such as Goodyear and General Motors. Microsoft has not announced a timeline for its public rollout.
The company also announced a significant update to Bing Chat, its AI chatbot, on Tuesday: visual search. Users can now take or upload a photo to Bing Chat and ask for more information on it through the desktop or Bing apps.