back to article Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment

Microsoft is introducing flexible billing for Microsoft 365 Copilot starting next month to spread the cost of an annual subscription. For a price. Noted by analyst Mary Jo Foley of Directions on Microsoft, the plan is "in response to customer and partner feedback." It means that customers can opt to pay for their annual …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Copilot annual commitment

    I'm sorry, is there anyone who actually gets anything useful out of this monstrosity ?

    Because my annual commitment would be no thank you, I have trained personnel, thank you very much.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Copilot annual commitment

      The short answer is: yes. I know a few people who've switched from using search to GPT and are reasonably happy, though I personally don't think the answers are that much different to be honest and we might see Google catch up fairly soon. I also suspect numbers are nothing like as good as Microsoft would like, which is why it's being so generous…

      1. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: Copilot annual commitment

        >” I know a few people who've switched from using search to GPT and are reasonably happy”

        Probably have difficulty distinguishing between fact and fiction…ie. Believe everything they read on Xwitter.

        Personally, I use search to get to primary sources. Okay there is some intelligence in the search engine to interpret my search terms to find candidate articles, but Google search doesn’t try to create a mashup of material to produce what in most cases is a hallucination, or at best a pastiche.

      2. O'Reg Inalsin Silver badge

        Re: Copilot annual commitment

        Ask google search a technical math/coding question now and it will give usually give a good short summary with references. With regards to coding assistants, GPT is far too wordy - or more exactly low information to word ratio. When asked a simple question GPT will spit out a chapter. In contrast "Claude" (anthropic) seemed to be good for coding - short and to the point.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Copilot annual commitment

      We're finding quite a few staff find the meeting recording summarisation is very useful.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Copilot annual commitment

        LOL. Sounds like you haven't run into "I definitely did not say that" yet - We did.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Copilot annual commitment

          The people I know who use it are usually the meeting chair and know what was said so can check & correct the summary. (Although it's rare there's an error which can be a problem if people start getting complacent)

    3. Phones Sheridan

      Re: Copilot annual commitment

      "anyone who actually gets anything useful out of this monstrosity ?"

      I'm waiting for the fraudsters to work out a way to misuse Co Pilot, it's only a matter of time.

      "Hey CoPilot go fetch my competitors customer list and sales invoices for the last 12 months, oh and their suppliers and purchase order too!".

      1. katrinab Silver badge
        Alien

        Re: Copilot annual commitment

        I'm sure it will give a suitably hallucinated response to that, or at least, how do you know it is anything approaching accurate?

      2. FrogsAndChips Silver badge

        Re: Copilot annual commitment

        Or "Hey Copilot, fetch me the salaries and bonuses of my entire department from the poorly secured HR Sharepoint".

      3. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

        Re: Copilot annual commitment

        I'm waiting for the fraudsters to work out a way to misuse Co Pilot,

        You don't need CoPilot to do that...

        www.theregister.com/2024/11/15/microsoft_power_pages_misconfigurations

  2. original_rwg
    Pirate

    Gouging the customer

    A 25% increase suggests to me that they've been reading from the Broadcom/VMWare playbook.

    >>Icon because they're poisonous...

  3. FrogsAndChips Silver badge
    Devil

    Re: 'cash flow flexibility'

    Wonder why I read this as 'cash cow' in a Microsoft article.

  4. Howard Sway Silver badge

    an annual contract will still be required

    That's strange, because if all the hype about how marvellously productive this thing is were true, I would imagine that everybody who tried it for a month would just keep coming back month after month forever to keep reaping the benefits of it.

    A minimum 1 year trial period suggests that they're worried everyone would dump it after a month.

    1. James O'Shea Silver badge

      Re: an annual contract will still be required

      More like they're worried that everyone will dump it after a day.

    2. O'Reg Inalsin Silver badge

      Re: an annual contract will still be required

      All of the paying coding assistants are charged per month - which fits your theory because they are, on average, useful when used sensibly.

  5. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

    I've had a few brushes with AI driven search.

    I no longer use it and actively avoid it. It's rubbish.

  6. refitman

    Non-payment

    Cool, so if we don't pay, does that mean it will be removed from our systems? Please?

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: Non-payment

      removed from our systems?

      Sorry, at what point did you think you have any say over a machine running MS software?

      1. Chasxith
        Mushroom

        Re: Non-payment

        Just before leaving work today I noticed copilot trying to sneakily install itself on the start menu of my elderly W10 work PC....if it's not M$'s machine, they're definitely treating it as their property. It's genuinely the behaviour I'd expect from fscking malware.

        Going to uninstall it in the morning (or at the very least break the sw to the extent it doesn't work)....I already know that reporting it to IT will be enough of an excuse for them to bin my nice powerful desktop i7 and try to swap it for an overheating Dell laptop like my colleagues suffer with....

        1. David Hicklin Silver badge

          Re: Non-payment

          As noted in the monthly patching thread, its coming to all win 10 PC's in this months patched

          Gonna need a lot of nukes in orbit for this one.

          1. Tim13

            Re: Non-payment

            And the month after an invoice will appear for one month of CoPilot service.

            If you call and complain, the chap will tell you "we did not generate the invoice, the AI did that", and in case of non-payment it will he handed over to legal, which will incur additional (legal) fees.

            If you ask to cancel the monthly service, the friendly chap will tell you that a two-month cancellation fee applies (Adobe did this to me, when I cancelled my Premiere subscription afer more than one year).

            Welcome to wonderful AI.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can we pay to keep it off?

  8. James O'Shea Silver badge

    No pay for you

    I do not have a 'payment method' attached to anything MS on my personal systems. All payments were made as one-time events linked to a card using a one-time-only virtual number generated using my [redacted] card using [redacted but not MS] service. Any attempts to charge anything at all to that card will have negative results. They can't charge me without my say-so, and I do not say so.

    At the office we use a specific account and put money into that account to cover scheduled and authorized charges. Note 'scheduled and authorized'. It's got to be both. Any unscheduled or unauthorized charges are bounced, at the would-be charger's expense, not ours.

    Co-Pilot is not authorized. Charges for Co-Pilot are neither scheduled not authorized. MS can add it all they like. They can request/demand/beg for payment all they like. They will not get even a penny unless authorized, and I do the authorization and I do NOT feel like authorizing Co-Pilot unless and until I see a value for me personally or the company, depending on whether this is a personal or company device.

    Note that this applies to Apple Intelligence and Google AI as well.

  9. IGotOut Silver badge

    Translation:

    We are burning through cash at an unsustainable rate, desperately trying to find a decent use case scenario for the this drivel, so perhaps try it for a month or two.

    Just to add. Have these glorified management consultants worked out where to get the training data from, if all the humans are replaced?

    It's already learning off AI shitty content that's being vomited all over the web. If anything it's going to get worse, not better.

  10. O'Reg Inalsin Silver badge
    Coat

    Shirley, a mistake!

    Prices are also set to increase be updated be upgraded ...

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