Tech Desk 
Jan 16, 2025
Microsoft introduced 365 Copilot Chat on Wednesday, a new enterprise-focused subscription plan that includes support for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The company has been firmly pushing its Copilot subscription to businesses and individuals.
The new subscription provides more flexible access to the company's AI services, replacing fixed subscription fees with a pay-as-you-go model.
Moreover, this plan includes access to Microsoft's free Copilot Chat for businesses.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
The Redmond-based tech giant shared details of the new subscription plan, now available to enterprises. The new Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is adequately a "lite" version of the existing Copilot plan, offering a flexible payment system and fewer AI features.
The latter costs $30 (around INR 2,600) a month per person. Microsoft's new subscription tier appears to be a strategic step to convince large businesses who are still apprehensive of these AI services and do not want to pay a hefty amount for thousands of employees.
However, the Copilot Chat allows them to check the features, and see if the features are perfect or not. With the pay-as-you-go plan, businesses can monitor their usage and only use the tool for relevant tasks.
The 365 Copilot also offers a metered payment option for agents performing autonomous actions, in the Copilot Chat subscription, even the work data-based actions are chargeable.
In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft's CMO of AI at Work, Jared Spataro, briefed what businesses will have to pay for using AI agents.
Microsoft utilises “messages” as the unit of AI agent usage. Messages are essentially responses generated by the agent. However, there is no clarity on if the length of the response or special formatting adds to the cost. Spataro said that one message is equal to one cent (around INR 0.86).
Utilising the AI chat for web-grounded responses costs zero messages (free services), while typical answers cost one message. If the Copilot has to generate a response, it will cost businesses two messages.
Moreover, generating a response using data from Microsoft Graph will cost 30 messages and autonomous actions are priced at 25 messages per action.
