COPILOT PRO & COPILOT FOR MICROSOFT 365
Why Copilot is great, when it’s awful and which version you should buy
CONTRIBUTORS: Ian Betteridge, Tim Danton, Adam Timberley
Ah, Microsoft. How we love your ability to create world-dominating software with one hand and sow world-beating confusion with the other. In January, finally, it announced that Copilot for Office was available for all. Except, this being Microsoft, calling it Copilot for Office would be too simple. Instead, we now have the free Copilot, Copilot Pro and Copilot for Microsoft 365. (And Windows Copilot, GitHub Copilot and a trio of Sales, Service and Security Copilots, but let’s ignore these distractions.)
Now, vanilla Copilot has nothing to do with Office. It’s the successor to Bing Chat and, unless you choose to download the Copilot apps for iOS and Android, you’ll access it via the web. As it’s based on GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, though, it remains a powerful tool – especially when you consider that Microsoft doesn’t charge a penny.
Copilot Pro, which costs £19 inc VAT per month, is a different beast altogether. If you already have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription then a Copilot button inveigles its way into the main apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Office. However, let’s lay a big, fat caveat here: it’s only for the desktop apps on Windows for now. Apple fans are restricted to web apps and iPadOS. As you’ll discover, this “it’s coming soon” mantra is a recurring feature for Copilot Pro.
There are two other good reasons to consider paying the £19 per month. One is that you get “priority access” to GPT-4 during peak times, so you both get to feel smug and wait shorter times for results. The other is that it gives you 100 daily “boosts” in Microsoft Designer, which is powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, compared to 15 from plain Copilot. A “boost” translates into fast GPU time, so again you’ll rarely find yourself waiting for images to be created.
Finally, we come to Copilot for Microsoft 365. This is Microsoft’s AI heavyweight, adding full integration with SharePoint and adding Teams to the mix. For now, Teams is the best Copilot integration by a distance. As we’ll discuss, it has the potential to save employees a lot of time – but also requires your business to invest heavily in IT time, particularly during the setup stage, and money forever.
Until recently, Copilot for Microsoft 365 was limited to businesses with over 300 seats. Now, any size of business can buy it – even a one-seat business, as it works
