Tag: Chatbot

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Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: Everything you need to know including features, agents, pricing, and how to access it.

Copilot Chat on a Phone

Microsoft announced last week (15th Jan) that Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is coming to every Microsoft 365 Commercial Customer regardless of whether or not they have paid Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses and what’s more we now get access to use agents with company data grounding support. Along with it comes a new pay-as-you-go tier that allows employees to access everything from chatbots to agents without the need for a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

While Microsoft is still confident that the full Microsoft 365 Copilot remains “our best in class personal AI assistant for work“, the new pay-as-you-go tier means organisations can start using the technology at a much lower entry point and look to address key business cases rather than going full in on Microsoft 365 Copilot. .

“Copilot Chat enables your entire workforce — from customer service representatives to marketing leads to frontline technicians — to start using Copilot and agents today”.
Jared Spataro | Chief Marketing Officer | AI at Work | Microsoft.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat?

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is Microsoft’s AI-powered chat feature designed to empower every person in every organisation to leverage Generative AI to make their “work lives easier and more efficient”.

For the employee, Microsoft Copilot Chat is a “personal assistant” they can chat with to get get answers, understand things better and get things done faster. Copilot Chat is It’s part of the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot suite but focuses specifically on enhancing communication and collaboration through chat.

How is Copilot Chat Different from Microsoft 365 Copilot?

The main differences between Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot is three-fold.

  1. Chat within Microsoft 365 Copilot provides work-grounded chat which means that Copilot can reason over data within your Microsoft 365 organisation such as files, SharePoint sites, your OneDrive, people (within Entra ID), your meetings, chat and email etc. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat cannot access this data unless you “paste” into a chat window.
  2. Copilot within the Office 365 Apps such as Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word etc is only available with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
  3. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a paid add-on, where as Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is included for free within your core Microsoft 365 licensing.

Microsoft Copilot Chat – Beyond Web Grounded Chat!

I’m personally not a fan of the name Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat because I do think it confuses people. The point I want to bring out here and why this was worthy of a post, is that previously, Copilot Chat (as it was called) only had access to data on the web and did note have the ability to leverage any of the new AI features such as Agents.

This has now changed. As the table above shows, with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, organisation will be able to create agents that do have access to data stored or connected to your Microsoft 365 tenant and also (and this is big) the ability for organisations to build and use autonomous agents (agents that can operate independently of a user).

The use of these new AI capabilities are paid for using a PAYG model. This means non Microsoft 365 Copilot users will have access to AI agents (for example in SharePoint) even if they themselves do not have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

What does Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Provide?

Key Features of Microsoft 365 Copilot

  1. Copilot Chat
    • Free, secure AI chat powered by GPT-4 and GPT-4o.
    • Ability to use Copilot Agents for automating tasks directly in the chat.
    • Support for file uploads in chat for summarising documents, analysing data, and suggesting improvements.
  2. Support for Copilot Pages
    • Collaborate in real-time with AI and team members.
    • Integrate content from Copilot, files, and the web.
    • Create AI-generated images for campaigns and social media.
  3. Agents
    • Ability to create and use agents using natural language to automate repetitive tasks.
    • PAYG / metered pricing for agents with IT control over deployment and management rather than requiring all users to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
  4. Copilot Control System
    • Enterprise data protection (EDP) for privacy and security.
    • Enables IT to better govern access, usage, and lifecycle of Copilot and agents.
    • Allows for measurement and reporting capabilities just like other Copilot Services.

Use Case Examples

A couple of use case scenarios are;

  1. A customer service rep can ask a customer relationship management (CRM) agent for account details before a customer meeting.
  2. A service or field service agent can access step-by-step instructions or real-time product information from information stored in SharePoint or Dynamics 365.
  3. A sales person can get help with positioning a product based on information on solution propositions or marketing collateral.

How much does it cost?

Understanding the charges is not super straight forward to map. For comparison though, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license costs around $30 per user per month, so use this as a basis for comparison.

In another blog post, Richard Riley, General Manager of Power Platform at Microsoft said that “usage of agents is measured in ‘messages’ and the total cost is based on the sum of messages used by your organization.“

So what does that mean? Well, Microsoft now offers two ways for organisations to access the pay-as-you-go version of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat:

  1. Track each “message” sent to the AI whereby each message costs $0.01, billed monthly.
  2. Pre-buying a pack of messages. This works a bit like a mobile data plan. As an example, you can buy 25,000 messages for $200 a month

The actual cost vary based on the type of response you need with responses that need generative AI costing more than responses that don’t.

  • Web-based answer: Free / no-cost
  • Classic answer: 1 message
  • Generative answer: 2 messages
  • Answers pulling data from company’s own systems (e.g., SharePoint): 30 messages

This paid capability is of course optional and organisations can decide whether to turn it ‘on’ or ‘off’ in Copilot Studio.”

Riley introduced the concept of “autonomous actions,” describing them as “generatively orchestrated triggers, topics, data connectors, and workflows, visible in the activity map displayed in generative orchestration mode“.

These are also available as pay-as-you-go, with a cost of 25 messages each time they act.

Here’s some costed use examples…

  • An agent answering customer questions online could use 500 classic answers and 2,000 generative ones, costing $45 for those 4,500 messages.
  • Another agent answering HR questions internally using Microsoft Graph data might use 200 generative and 200 tenant Graph messages, costing 6,400 messages or $64 for the day.

This approach allows businesses to fine-tune their AI usage to meet their specific needs, addressing concerns about the high costs of deploying these tools across enterprises. It also helps cost modeling certain scenarios much easier and provides an alternative to just giving every person a $30 per month Copilot License.

Using Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Assuming IT have enabled this in your environment, you can try this by navigating to https://m365copilot.com or by downloading the Microsoft 365 Copilot App from your preferred app store.

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Intro and demo of Microsoft Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio Logo

Microsoft has recently unveiled the introduction of its new Copilot Studio platform, aiming to empower Microsoft 365 organisations to build their own generative artificial intelligence (AI) ‘copilot’ assistants.

Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2023 this month, Copilot Studio was officially announced alongside a plethora of other updates (and new Copilots), as part of their ongoing efforts to enhance and expand artificial intelligence capabilities across their core product offerings.

With Copilot Studio, users will be able to efficiently create, test, and deploy independent copilots and custom GPTs, providing them with a seamless experience in harnessing the potential of AI technology.

Copilot Studio exposes a full end-to-end lifecycle for customisations and standalone copilots within a single pane of glass meaning you can build, deploy, analyse, and manage all from within the same Web experience….and since it’s a software as a service (SaaS), everything you create is live instantly.

Jared Spataro | Head of Modern Work & Bus Apps | Microsoft.

The announcement of Microsoft Copilot Studio follows the roll-out of a similar DIY copilot creation platform from OpenAI last week called GPT Store. Copilot essentially replaces Power Virtual Agents and is available to try now.

What does Microsoft Copilot Studio do?

Microsoft Copilot Studio leverages low-code, no code and provides a web-based platform that completely transforms the way Microsoft 365 customers users approach application development and extension. Of course, one of the key advantages of Copilot Studio is its seamless integration with the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem and the Microsoft Graph – enabling developers to easily leverage existing data and tools within their organisation, streamlining the development process and maximising productivity. Copilot Studio, like Power Platform is designed for professional developers or users new to AI application development – providing a comprehensive set of tools and resources to support your journey.

Copilot Studio makes it easy to design and prototype AI applications and offers a wide range of templates and pre-built components, empowering even non-technical users to create innovative solutions.

Copilot Studio also brings robust testing capabilities, including integrated debugging tools and simulation environments to help developers easily identify and address any issues before deploying their applications.

Once the AI app is built and tested, Copilot Studio provides a simple deployment process. It provides seamless integration with Microsoft 365 services that allow IT to publish the application to your Microsoft 365 cloud environment or share it with specific users or teams.

How to build your first Copilot in Copilot Studio (follow along).

Once you have signed up for a trial of copilot (it’s in preview), getting started is easy. To login, simply go to Microsoft Copilot Studio

Step 1: Build my Copilot. The easiest way to start is to follow the wizard and point Copilot Studio at a website. For this example, I have used my children’s school.

There are advanced options which include the ability to dive straight into existing data sets and experiences that you have created in Power Platform, but for simplicity, I am following the wizard.

Step 2: Explore the interface: From here you can then see the options expand. You can go straight to the Generative AI Chatbot and start to test it based on the website you have linked it too, or start looking at the options below which include the ability to:

  • Create Custom Topics for your Copilot.
  • Create Plugins and Actions to connect to data that is outside the website.
  • Extend the Microsoft 365 Copilot with data connectors and plugins to your other data.

Step 3: Customise the Generative AI settings: I’m going to click on the “Go to Generative AI” and customise the “sensitivity” of Copilot (I have set mine to medium). I can also further customisations such as adding additional websites for indexing or even upload specific files. The Generative AI model uses the Azure Open AI service. Here I have added another website to index.

Step 4: Testing my Copilot. I can now quickly test my Copilot out by asking a question. In this example I am going to ask it about the schools in the Academy Trust and then dig a little more into the school he attends.

Step 5: Adding Custom Topics: By default, you don’t have much control over the data that comes with the generative answers. This is where topics come into play. These allow you to add in specific topics that you want the bots to be able to speak or answer that have not come automatically from the data, websites, databases or documents you have connected in.

Step 6: Publishing your Copilot: To Publish your Copilot, you have a few options. You can publish to a website (either your own or one can be created for you), to Teams or other locations. To do this, you first need to navigate to Settings –> Channels and choose where you wish to publish your Copilot. For this example, I have chosen a Demo Website.

Once you’ve done that (you can pick multiple), head on over Publish menu on the left and publish your Copilot. You then get a link to test your Copilot. Here is mine below in a simple demo website.

There we go – a very simple first look at the potential of Microsoft Copilot Studio. Next time we will explore a little more. Have a play and look at the potential and possibilities.

How can I try Copilot Studio?

Copilot Studio is available to try now and will be available to all Microsoft 365 customers who have a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.

Summary

Copilot Studio should bring the same ease of use to Gen AI apps as Power Platform did for apps, virtual agents and flow. It’s central hub, intuitive design tools, robust testing capabilities, and simple yet powerful deployment options aim to help accelerate and simplify the design, build, testing and deployment of custom AI applications.

By providing users with the tools to develop their own copilots, Microsoft is fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. Copilot Studio opens up countless possibilities for businesses, researchers, and developers alike. Whether it’s creating intelligent chatbots, generating realistic text, or automating repetitive tasks, the potential applications of GPTs are limitless.

Similar to its counterpart GPT Store, Copilot Studio puts the power of AI into the hands of those who seek to harness its capabilities. It offers a user-friendly interface that streamlines the process of building custom GPT models and applications. This accessibility ensures that individuals with various levels of technical expertise can participate in this exciting field, expanding the boundaries of what is possible with language-based AI.

The demo build example is a simple first step into building Gen AI led chatbots and copilots using websites and other data sources. This is simple to test and try.

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