Microsoft will charge more for corporate use of AI and promotes protected search on Bing – 07/18/2023 – Tech

Microsoft said on Tuesday it will charge at least 53% more for access to new artificial intelligence (AI) features in software used by companies, in a glimpse of the windfall profit it hopes to reap from the technology.

The company also said it will make a more secure version of its Bing search engine available to businesses, with the aim of addressing concerns about data protection, boosting companies’ interest in AI and improving its level of competition with Google.

At the Inspire virtual conference, the company said that enterprise customers will pay $30 per user, per month, for the Microsoft 365 artificial intelligence tool called Copiloto. The system promises to compose emails in Outlook, write documents in Word and make virtually all data used by an employee accessible through a chatbot.

The value means that the tool could triple the costs for some Microsoft customers.

In an interview, Jared Spataro, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said the tool pays for itself through time savings and productivity gains. Copiloto summarizes the conferences held by the Teams online meeting system, for example.

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

Spataro declined to predict revenue for Copilot, which at least 600 companies have tested since launching in March. The AI ​​program is not yet available to everyone.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is referring companies to Bing Chat Enterprise, a bot on its search engine that can generate content that is included in subscriptions used by some 160 million workers.

Unlike the public Bing search engine, the corporate version does not allow any viewing or saving of user data, promises Microsoft. An employee would have to log in with work credentials to gain these protections.

The release follows growing industry concern about employees entering otherwise confidential information into public chatbots, which human reviewers can read or the AI ​​can reproduce.

Asked whether Bing users are unprotected, Spataro said Microsoft has made its privacy policies clear and is looking forward to bringing AI to consumers. The company also announced the ability to upload images and search for content related to them, as Google allows.