When we thought Microsoft was done making their employees lazy and even super lazy, the company recently announced its one year completion of Copilot’s release. With this, further enhancements to Copilot capabilities were announced, integrating all the features that already exist on ChatGPT. Is the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership favouring one side a little too much? 

Microsoft Brings Business

As per a recent report, Microsoft Azure-OpenAI partnership has given rise to close to 79% of ChatGPT Enterprise customers. Within four months of launching ChatGPT Enterprise, the company acquired close to 25,000 customers. That’s a whopping growth, but only 16% of the users directly came from ChatGPT Enterprise. 

The figures are an indication of how ChatGPT Enterprise has still not managed to attract the audience through their direct channel and is heavily reliant on Microsoft users. As per recent data, there are over 722 million Azure users and 85% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure Cloud- numbers that can be potential ChatGPT Enterprise users. 

Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service allows enterprises and developers to build on GPT, Dall.E and other OpenAI applications. Furthermore, Microsoft’s continuous effort to make their office suite, Microsoft 365, a wholesome multi-functional workspace platform has only been ramped up. 

Microsoft will release several new features to Copilot at the start of 2024. The upcoming enhancements will include the integration of GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI’s latest model. Furthermore, DALL-E 3, GPT4- Vision, and Code Interpreter will also be integrated. 

A Complete Ecosystem 

Microsoft Azure, the cloud platform has elaborately built an ecosystem that holds the users in one place. Transitioning to another platform involves pushback that dissuades users from migrating. In the case of Microsoft Azure users, who are already accustomed to the platform, will not shift to ChatGPT Enterprise, but rather continue being on the Microsoft ecosystem. 

When AIM got in touch with a financial enterprise at the GitHub Copilot event last month in San Francisco, the company which had experimented with both Amazon CodeWhisperer and Google Duet chose to adopt Copilot in May owing to its alignment to their existing platform of Microsoft Azure. 

Partnership with Restrictions 

With Satya Nadella having a non-voting observer seat at the OpenAI board, it is only obvious that the collaboration will become stronger with Microsoft having strategic powers over OpenAI’s business decisions. 

Interestingly, Microsoft is also trying its best to not be closely tied with OpenAI too. Though Microsoft’s AI image was boosted through the OpenAI partnership, the recent Altman exit fiasco has made everyone wary of the results of heavily relying on one company. 

Recently, during Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting, the company emphasised to its investors about how they do not solely rely on OpenAI. Nadella said that the company will take a ‘broad tent approach,’ and spoke about how the company is working on their language model Phi and also offering open-source models on Azure. 

Security Makes Everyone Wary

The notoriety associated with security issues of ChatGPT has always marred its image in an enterprise world. At the recent AWS re:Invent, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, took a dig at ChatGPT’s security flaws while introducing guardrails and safety features for Amazon Bedrock. 

Adam Selipsky at AWS re:Invent 

Though a strong partnership exists between the companies, there were times when Microsoft restricted employees from using AI tools such as ChatGPT owing to security and data concerns. The ban fiasco that happened recently, led to rumours to which Sam Altman confirmed that there wouldn’t be any form of restriction from OpenAI’s end on Microsoft Office 365 products. A statement that reinstates Microsoft’s dominance in the whole OpenAI-Microsoft partnership.  

From the progress of both companies, it is evident that Microsoft’s users will benefit from OpenAI , resulting in a lot of ChatGPT Enterprise user traffic from Microsoft Azure. However, Microsoft continues to play it safe by portraying themselves as not solely reliant on OpenAI for their AI developments. It looks like a so-called symbiotic relationship that heavily favours Microsoft.