Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat & AI Agents for Everyone!

To stay competitive in today's business landscape, embracing AI is essential. While this might sound like a cliché, it holds a fundamental truth. As the next stage in digital transformation, no other technology trend currently offers as much potential for efficiency gains as AI transformation.

Microsoft recognizes this and, on January 15, 2025, announced the democratization of its AI assistant. Simply put: Copilot for everyone!

But that's not all. Microsoft is ushering in the year of Agentic AI, opening access to its AI agent tools. This initiative aims to empower the entire workforce to create AI assistants that can automate both repetitive tasks and more complex decision-making processes—largely without requiring deep programming or machine learning knowledge.

With this move, the tech giant is providing an incredibly accessible solution for company-wide AI adoption. From office staff to frontline workers, everyone will now have access to Copilot Chat and AI agents.

However, the devil is in the details. We break down the new offerings for you. 

Let's start with the terminology. Microsoft has evolved the previously known Microsoft Copilot into two distinct offerings:

• The familiar "Microsoft Copilot" is now called “Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.”

• Additionally, there is still the "Microsoft 365 Copilot."

   

Now, let's dive into the differences between Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot (see the graphic below for more details):

• To access the Microsoft Copilot offerings, you need to be a Microsoft 365 commercial customer with at least an Entra ID license.
• Previously, an Enterprise licensing plan was required to use Microsoft Copilot. Now, an Entra ID license is sufficient for all employees to access Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat features the familiar user interface of the text-based AI assistant. It operates web-based, powered by GPT-4o, and can pull information from selected company data. This makes it an easily accessible tool for quickly retrieving information, analyzing documents, and completing simple tasks.
• The basic security features in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat remain unchanged, ensuring secure input of company-related data into the voice assistant. This continues to make Microsoft an attractive alternative to ChatGPT for businesses.
• However, for direct integration of Copilot functionalities into Microsoft 365 Office tools and unrestricted access to the data stored there, Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing is still required. With these extended data sources, Microsoft 365 Copilot is designed to automate more complex business processes and conduct comprehensive data analyses. The licensing cost remains at $30 per user per month.
• New to the chat is the ability to create and use AI agents. These can simplify routine tasks, such as creating an FAQ agent based on policy documents in SharePoint with just a few clicks.
• While the basic functionalities of AI agents are available without additional licensing, advanced functionalities that go beyond web-based responses or enable autonomous actions of the agents incur additional costs. Microsoft offers a transparent, consumption-based payment model for this. This allows companies to discover automation use cases with AI agents to increase efficiency in their operations easily and with full cost control. 

→ For customers with Enterprise licenses, nothing changes negatively regarding the full functionality of the M365 Copilot technology. All features remain available at the same cost. Newly added is access to Microsoft's AI agent tools within Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. If you want your agents to operate autonomously, a consumption-based pricing model applies.

→ For organizations without an Enterprise license, Microsoft is significantly opening the door to the world of Copilot. The newly available Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat offers an excellent entry point into AI transformation. It provides the greatest flexibility, allowing all employees, regardless of their role or skill level with generative AI, to explore the AI assistant.

→ However, companies should still carefully consider who within their workforce uses Microsoft 365 Office applications or AI agents extensively and thus requires full integration of Copilot functionalities into MS tools with unrestricted data access. For these "heavy users," investing in Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30 per user per month is still recommended.

→ For occasional users, Microsoft's new consumption-based pricing model is ideal. Here, data from Microsoft Office 365 applications can also be queried using agents, but at approximately 30 cents per query.