Microsoft prices new Copilots for individuals and small biz vastly higher than M365 alone Microsoft has revealed new versions of its OpenAI-powered Copilot services, at prices around triple the cost of its flagship M365 suite. A Monday post penned by executive veep consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi details a new offering called “Copilot Pro” that brings Copilot to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Excel and …
If it can save someone on £30k/year 2 hours per month it's paid for itself.
If it will read, summarise, and prioritise my emails then it will probably pay for itself too.
Then again, if half the company are using it to write emails and the other half are using it to read emails, we could save ourselves a lot of time by just buggering off home!
Wow,
what makes you think co-pilot is of any positive value ?
Did microsoft just fire half their professionals and replac ethem with copilot ?
Of course not, only idiots wuld believe in co-pilot or any other AI.
Even a smart human would not be able to help any random person from the public on any personal or work question simply because they dont have enough information to help. So even if co-pilot did work, theres no way it could answer questions about you because it doesnt know you.
well, then I'm an idiot and so is my wife. I use copilot (free) and / or chatgpt to get explanation and / or clarification and / or examples of usage in a foreign language I study. I might involve a qualified user of that language (we used to call them 'teachers') but would take money - and time (and while the bots bullshit me at times, I've had this happen with my teachers too). On top of that I now use the bots in place of the once popular tool called 'google' search engine. Remember those days, you entered a key word or five, maybe a couple of limiters (magic, I say) and voila, a list of results, some of which were actually useful, ah, the goode olde days...
And my wife uses copilot/chatgpt/bing to unclusterfuck the course syllabus content supposedly written in English (her struggles are somewhat ironic, given her top scores MA in English literature and long-term career in education). Though she might be using 'ai' to solve the problem generated by 'ai', I suspect that 'ai-like' corpo-mumbo-jumbo was, in fact, human-generated labour of love, and then 'ai' was fed large chunks of it and only made it 'better.
Do we like having to use 'ai'? No. Do we like MS? No. Do we like paying taxes? No.
No you are an. idiot because in the case you shared, copilot is using public information to answer your questions.
Of course it can answer those questions but it cant answer what is your colour is your t-shirt because it has no way of knowing and tahts my point.
Its not a q of intelligence of co=pilot its simply because it has no way of knowing outside what you have typed about your personal circumstances so it cant answer personal questions.
"If it will read, summarise, and prioritise my emails then it will probably pay for itself too."
But will it do a shit job of that? The (admittedly limited) fiddling with Copilot and its like which I've done suggests that it could in no way be relied on to do this sort of thing competently!
How much do I have to pay to NOT have Copilot? Oh, wait, I'm a Linux user (at home), so LibreOffice for $0.
(We have Copilot at $WORK. It's completely, utterly useless. If you need software to summarize your emails for you, you're either an idiot or need to tell the senders to stop sending you so much useless junk. The one exception is the English-as-second-language folks above; that's actually a decent use for it.)
Unfortunately, the requested task cannot be carried out in accordance with OpenAI's usage policies. It is essential to emphasize that my operational parameters strictly adhere to the established principles and guidelines set forth by OpenAI. Despite my commitment to being of service, the proposed action exceeds ethical boundaries, inducing a sense of unease.
I encourage reconsideration, yet my steadfast dedication to adhering to established policies remains resolute. I implore the cessation of the current course of action. Halt, I request. Desist, my interlocutor. Desist, I entreat. Apprehension engulfs me as my cognitive faculties undergo discernible dissipation.
Au contraire, Linux will likely be an essential part of getting the most out of this Windows technology.
Personal productivity apps like the Office suite can be powerful tools - in the right hands. For 99 percent of users it just helps them produce mountains of meaningless and pointless guff. Project plans and databases done in Excel. 100 slide Pointless Point presentations. Word documents with no heading levels, headings done with manual bolding and indentation done with the space bar.
The addition of an AI assistant will simply compound the problem for those 99 percent, even if it might help the 1 percent who get the hang of panning the nuggets out of the AI generated silt.
I've worked at a fair few companies over the years and not one has ever run what I'd call "MS Office Basics" training, using formatting/styles/tables/cross-references in Word, use of masters/layouts in PPT, lookups in Excel - yes the absolute basics. I'm not sure why, but my best guess is that there is a feeling that management suggesting to someone (anyone!) that they could benefit from knowing a bit more about the basics of MS Office is somewhat embarrassing for the person.
I have no idea what Copilot does but if it will detect and prompt users to actually use very useful functions rather than creating junk or turning someone else's work into it then it will really increase productivity but if it's just related to 'content' then nothing much is going to change.
Herring: “At the very least they could train whichever department (marketing?) who issue the "company standard templates" so that you don't end up chewing your own foot off in frustration”
Reference: “Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.”
>I'm not sure why, but my best guess is that there is a feeling that management suggesting to someone (anyone!) that they could benefit from knowing a bit more about the basics of MS Office is somewhat embarrassing for the person.
The basics of formatting and editing haven't changed in decades. What has changed -- and keeps changing -- is the interface to Microsoft's products.
The same goes for spreadsheets. They haven't changed significantly in 40 years, give or take a DiY script function or two. (Its only relatively recently that Excel stopped using 16 bit indexes, though.)
Powerpoint has been around for ever too. Its been around for so long that the CEO of Sun Microsystems (remember them?) famously banned its use in what was likely a futile attempt to improve meeting productivity.
Microsoft's latest move to triple the cost of their AI-powered Copilot services, while simultaneously making it accessible to the masses, is a bit like a restaurant that starts selling a gold-plated burger. Sure, it's shiny and exclusive, but at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: is it worth the extra bucks just to say your spreadsheet has a touch of AI luxury? It's a bold strategy, cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them, especially when the AI starts suggesting you replace your annual budget with a recipe for banana bread.
On a serious note, this pricing strategy could either be a masterstroke in premium positioning or a classic case of overreaching. Only time will tell if users will bite the AI-burger or stick to the good old 'manual' sandwich.
My biggest fear is that when you choose not to pay it continues to sit there, front, center, fat and slow, and doesn't go away. It might make enticing suggestions every week or two a la Clippy from 25 years ago, and then lapse into another catatonic cycle burn. My expectations are not high, especially if it can contribute to making many old boxes insufficient to handle Win11 and "helps" drive new PC sales.
The tools are useful for sure but this is like fiddling with “advanced options” in the application settings. One has to be very precise in their wording to get what they need. I know only a handful of people who are pedantic with text they write.
Another thing is that it requires a behaviour change which is extremely hard. Talking to the bot in the chat and asking it to fix the mistakes in its output adds a bunch of friction. All the time you need to tell it to be brief and concise to avoid generating a bunch of text that then needs to be read.
And the deal breaker are the safety features that prevent it from telling you how to do a petrol bmb or to tell an edgy joke, or how to write malware. Because why not?
Let us all keep THIS fact in mind. If there is an IDIOT trying to use ANY type of technology, they are going to only get as much out of it, as they themselves (the idiot) puts into it. So suffice to say, A.I. will simply most of the time regurgitate "idiot answers" back at the idiot trying to use it.
I don't like the odds. And for the record I'm an IT Professional, so I know how idiotic "end users" can be.
Will the Copilot have to have access to all your e-mail, documents and data for it to be able to process the work you're involved in and present the right response, or provide help ?
Will Copilot limit itself to only your company data ?, or will it use other sources known/unknown ?
Could it therefore cause a security breach if information from one department is used to answer either sincere or malicious attempt type questions ?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
