Microsoft's 7 AI Copilots: Which one should you use?

Microsoft has launched an entire AI Copilot product line to revolutionize the way we interact with its software ecosystem, including productivity, security, encryption, etc.

So it stands to reason that choosing the right Copilot allows you to get more done in less time - but which Copilot is right for you and how much does it cost?

1. Microsoft Copilot

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Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing AI Chat) is a free AI chatbot accessible through a web browser and on operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and iPadOS. It can scan the Internet to answer queries, create and edit AI images, and generate text, and has access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo during off-peak hours. You can also interact with it using text, voice, and images, and can use plugins and GPT. So if you want a free multimodal chatbot with access to GPT-4, try using Microsoft Copilot now using your web browser.

2. Copilot in Windows 11

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Copilot in Windows 11 is a free AI-powered assistant that installs with Windows 11 version 23H2 or later. It's built directly into Windows 11 but goes a step further than the Microsoft Copilot search option in the Start menu by bringing Copilot directly to the desktop and giving it the ability to open programs, change features, etc. . This opens up a lot of possibilities because you can essentially use Microsoft Copilot to instruct Windows 11 what to do.

Although currently in preview, Copilot in Windows can already perform simple tasks such as changing Windows settings, arranging application windows, setting alarms, launching applications and troubleshooting problems. for your PC. This copilot also adds AI capabilities to popular Windows applications such as Paint, Photos, Snipping Tool and Clipchamp.

3. Copilot Pro

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If you need a faster and more capable AI assistant, supercharge your Copilot experience by subscribing to Copilot Pro. The individual license currently costs $20/month but offers significantly more capabilities than Copilot in Windows by adding the following features:

Priority access to GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo.
Create faster DALL-E 3 images plus 100x daily enhancements with Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator).
Integrate AI into your Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (separate Microsoft 365 subscription required).
Access the Copilot Builder Tool, which allows you to create custom GPTs.

The biggest reason to pay for Copilot Pro is to harness the power of AI in your work. With Copilot Pro, you get the AI capabilities in Microsoft 365 apps without requiring significant Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) hardware resources found in apps like Nvidia's Chat with RTX. This makes it a great solution for those who want to use AI on lower powered machines like laptops and tablets.

4. Copilot for Microsoft 365

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If you find all the functionality in Copilot Pro useful and need it for your entire team, then Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a service that may be of interest to your team. It offers all the features of Copilot Pro with powerful additions like:

Copilot in Teams: Gets you up to speed by providing a summary of key points, action items, and decisions made by your team in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Graph Grounding: Create a secure and unified API that links together various Microsoft 365 services.
Enterprise-Grade Data Protection: Copilot for Microsoft 365 inherits your organization's existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies.
Copilot Studio: Create custom GPTs for your organization quickly and easily with minimal manual programming.

Copilot for Microsoft has a starting price of 30 USD/person. There is no minimum seating requirement, but your organization will have to pay an annual fee. There are also prerequisites for Copilot for Microsoft 365, such as a license for Microsoft 365 E3/E5 or Office 365 E5 for business customers, Microsoft 365 Business Standard/Premium for business customers Business and Microsoft 365 A3/A5 for education customers.

5. Copilot GitHub

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Are you looking for a Copilot dedicated to programming? GitHub Copilot is a premium AI assistant integrated into some of the most popular programming environments, like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE. GitHub Copilot allows you to write code faster and with fewer errors by using AI for code completion, suggestions, refactoring, and debugging. It also comes with GitHub Copilot Chat, a chatbot that allows you to create code, ask questions, and provide useful information for programming.

GitHub Copilot Personal is a premium service that costs $10/month. However, if you are a student or teacher, GitHub Education offers this service for free once you are verified. If you are a programmer, hobbyist, or someone who wants to learn to code, GitHub Copilot is a great service that can provide better utility than other AI assistants like ChatGPT.

6. Copilot for Sales

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Are you looking to use AI to help manage your ecommerce site? Copilot for Sales is an AI companion that integrates with CRM to provide real-time insights to help you optimize your business. You can use Copilot for Sales to analyze leads, track deals, draft emails, present Outlook meetings with data from your CRM, create summaries, and create content in PowerPoint, Word and Excel.

Copilot for Sales starts at $50/month and will require users to have a product license for Microsoft 365. Customers subscribed to Copilot for Microsoft 365 can use this service for $20/month.

7. Copilot for Security

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Copilot for Security is an AI assistant that integrates services like Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune, and Microsoft Entra. Copilot for Security enables IT professionals to protect their services by proactively scanning for threats and deploying automated responses for faster threat management, incorporating chatbot elements Conversational AI with threat intelligence.

The Microsoft Tech Community blog has provided useful insight into two main areas that most people wonder about: What will it do and how much will it cost?

Copilot for Security will focus on 4 critical security operations tasks:

Incident Summary: Quickly understand security incidents, providing alerts for specific security issues
Impact analysis: Use AI analytics to detail the immediate impact of a security incident and organize a response
Script Reverse Engineering: Copilot for Security attempts to reverse-engineer malware, scripts, and other threats to speed analysis and incident response
Guided Response: Provides a step-by-step outline of incident response, action instructions, etc.

Interestingly, Microsoft is introducing a new pricing structure for Copilot for Security, suggesting the AI tool will be "billed monthly through the new Security Compute Unit (SCU) at $4/hour". It's unclear how much power, processing power or otherwise makes you count, but integrating AI deeply into security analytics could benefit the security sector.