Last week, Microsoft became the world’s most valuable company, with its market valuation of $2.89 trillion surpassing Apple’s $2.87 trillion. This is only the start.  Microsoft’s first major announcement for the year comes with the launch of Copilot Pro, and other features. This time, Microsoft has decided to reach every consumer possible.  

The new subscription Pro model is said to be equipped with advanced features and capabilities that look to assist people with tasks such as coding, designing, researching, and more. It looks to bring AI capabilities to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers who can even build Copilot GPTs : Microsoft’s big leap to catch all kinds of users. 

However, the biggest update has to be the availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to businesses of all sizes, including small and medium-sized businesses, something the company had overlooked till date.

Going by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision, which was announced during Microsoft Ignite 2023, where he said that ‘we are the copilot company’ and that there will be a future where there will be a ‘copilot for everyone and everything you do,’ the push to create Copilot Pro might just be the beginning.  

Enabling SMBs With Copilot

Since November, Copilot availability for Microsoft 365 users has been restricted to a 300-seat minimum for commercial plans. With yesterday’s announcement, the cap is removed and Copilot will be made available for Office 365 E3 and E5 customers (different enterprise plans). The cost is fixed at $30 per person, per month. 

The decision to allow small and medium-based businesses to access Copilot, allows Microsoft to cater to a large market. As per a report by the World Bank, SMEs account for 90% of businesses worldwide. 

Microsoft’s goal of targeting businesses of all kinds doesn’t stick to Copilot alone. With an upgraded collaboration with Walmart, Microsoft made significant announcements in the retail sector as a whole, where AI-capabilities and other functions will be provided to retail companies of all sizes including 

Copilot GPT and Apps 

Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant, that has eased the life of employees, has reached more than 5 billion chats and more than 5 billion images, and with the latest Copilot Pro, the company aims to further boost performance and productivity. 

While Copilot’s AI-features were primarily built to cater to enterprises, Microsoft is pushing it further to reach consumers of all kinds. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions that could not access Copilot features on Word, Excel, Outlook and more will now be able to do so. By adding a $20 per person subscription, Copilot Pro can be accessed. 

Additionally, Copilot Pro users will now be able to create their own GPTs using Copilot GPT Builder. A feature to engage more user engagement. Interestingly, Microsoft also announced the Copilot mobile app. 

The latest Copilot app will allow users to access all the capabilities of Copilot via their phone. The features that are included on the PC version of Copilot such as GPT-4 and Dall-E 3, will also exist on the app, and this will be available on both Android and iOS. Some users are already finding Copilot Pro to be better than ChatGPT. 

Programmer Paul Way’s tweet. Source: X

Microsoft Emulates OpenAI

Interestingly, Microsoft’s recent Copilot developments are closely following OpenAI’s footsteps. Microsoft has wisely chosen to make Copilot available as an app in order to capture a significant mobile market share. First familiarising people with Copilot capabilities and then introducing the app version will allow large conversions. 

ChatGPT was released as a mobile application on iOS months after ChatGPT made its debut. Two months following the iOS release, the app was then made available on Android. ChatGPT ended up being the fastest app to reach 100 million users. Microsoft might be possibly trying to emanate the same. 

If you look at Copilot Pro’s features that gives priority access to its latest models such as OpenAI GPT-4 Turbo, DALL.E 3 and more, is exactly similar to the features available on the upgraded version of ChatGPT i.e. ChatGPT Plus. Furthermore, OpenAI released the GPT Store last week and in less than a week, we now have Copilot GPT. 

Interestingly, just last week, OpenAI released ChatGPT Team, which offers GPT-4 and DALL.E 3 capabilities, along with providing a collaborative workspace for teams of all sizes. 

While the OpenAI-Microsoft strategic partnership allows the latter to benefit from all the latest models OpenAI releases, Microsoft is also strategically using it to push its dominance in the SMB and direct-to-consumer market. 

With the latest partnership announcement with Vodafone , where the aim is to bring generative AI, cloud and other services to over 300 million businesses and consumers, Microsoft’s route to dominance has already begun.