Microsoft Copilot Pro is a subscription service from Microsoft that builds on their Copilot AI assistant technology to provide enhanced features and integration. Copilot Pro offers faster AI image generation, accelerated performance through dedicated compute capacity, and native integration of the Copilot experience into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant from Microsoft that suggests completions and entire lines of code inside development environments like Visual Studio Code. Powered by OpenAI’s Codex model that was trained on billions of lines of public code, Copilot uses natural language understanding to provide relevant suggestions based on comments and code context. It is designed to boost developer productivity by reducing boilerplate code and handling rote coding tasks.
Copilot was launched in preview in 2021 and has seen rapid adoption by millions of developers. It represents one of the first mainstream integrations of large language model AI into complex productivity software. However, as an early preview product, Copilot also faced criticism around licensing clarity and code originality early on.
Microsoft Copilot Pro builds on the existing Copilot capability but charges a subscription fee to access additional features focused on enhancing the experience.
Faster AI Image Generation
One of the flagship features of Microsoft Copilot Pro is faster AI image generation integrated right into apps like Word. Users can provide a natural language description of the image they want to generate, and Copilot will instantly create a matching image using DALL-E-style generative AI.
Rather than having to leave your document and use a separate image generation site, everything happens inline and on demand. The image pops right into your Word doc, email, or other content. Microsoft touted up to 8-10x faster image generation compared to the web-based DALL-E experience.
This supercharges content creation workflows. Need an image to illustrate a concept you’re describing in a document? Simply tell Copilot what you want and insert the generated image without skipping a beat. The promise is that it eliminates friction and makes visually engaging content much easier to produce at scale.
Dedicated Compute for Accelerated Performance
In addition to faster AI image generation, Microsoft Copilot Pro also promises accelerated performance for suggestions and completions in Code. This is achieved by allocating dedicated compute capacity to run each user’s Copilot instance.
Whereas the free public preview of Copilot shares compute resources between many users, the dedicated capacity per subscriber effectively removes limits and guarantees high responsiveness. This is essential for developers that rely on Copilot to maintain velocity and flow state while coding. Slow or rate-limited suggestions would severely degrade the value.
By dedicating premium cloud hardware like specialized TPU chips to each customer, Microsoft ensures enough compute power is available to power peak Copilot performance at all times. Of course, it comes at a price via the Pro subscription compared to the free best-effort tier.
Access and Integration with Microsoft 365
The third pillar of Microsoft Copilot Pro’s value proposition is deep integration into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. This builds on Microsoft’s ownership of the Office productivity suite and gives Copilot abilities free web-based rivals can’t match.
Notable areas of integration include:
- Inline Copilot suggestions in Microsoft Word to help write faster. Copilot will suggest completions, entire sentences, and passages as you type to accelerate document drafting.
- Email acceleration with Outlook. Copilot helps generate email content, provides smart replies, and even suggests scheduling based on message content.
- Presentation assist in PowerPoint. Copilot will generate slides and presentation content using natural language prompts.
- General productivity boosting across Excel, Teams, Edge and more.
The promise is Copilot Pro becomes your universal digital assistant to boost productivity in work, communication, content creation and beyond thanks to deep access to core Microsoft 365 services.
Who is Microsoft Copilot Pro For?
Microsoft Copilot Pro aims to serve multiple constituencies with its blend of capabilities that build on the original Copilot developer tool:
Developers
Professional developers were the original target audience for Copilot as an AI pair programmer. And developers remain a core target for Copilot Pro as power users that want maximum coding productivity. The accelerated performance and lack of limits ensures Copilot Pro can handle intense workloads and sessions without slowing down coders.
Content Creators
The faster AI image generation and integrations with Word and PowerPoint make Copilot Pro very compelling for any content creators. Writers, marketers, students, educators, journalists, and more can benefit from AI-accelerated drafting and easy visuals through natural language prompts.
Office Workers
The Microsoft 365 integrations also serve the broader professional / office worker audience that rely on apps like Outlook, Excel and Teams day-to-day. AI assistance with communication, collaboration, analysis and documentation makes workers more productive.
IT Professionals
IT pros have hugely complex jobs supporting technology across their organizations. Copilot Pro serves as an AI-powered assistant to help with tasks like writing documentation, diagnosing issues, analyzing logs, producing reports, communicating status and recommendations, and automating repetitive work.
Designers
For graphic, product, UX and other designers, Copilot Pro turbocharges their ability to produce great visual concepts. Rather than painstakingly assembling mood boards, design systems and comps, they can instantly generate needed images through natural language, and focus efforts on creative direction.
Essentially any professional that deals with content creation, complex tools/data or communicates frequently is a potential user for Microsoft Copilot Pro. It aims to save time and boost outcomes on mission critical workflows.
How Much Does Microsoft Copilot Pro Cost?
As a premium subscription service building on Copilot’s free public preview, Microsoft Copilot Pro has a monthly or annual fee attached. At launch Microsoft announced Copilot Pro would cost $20 per user / month when billed annually. Volume and academic discounts will also be available to qualifying organizations.
So on an annual commitment it equates to $120 per user per year. That puts it right in line with standalone subscriptions to productivity tools like Microsoft 365, Evernote, Spotify, Adobe CC, etc. Given Copilot Pro’s promise of boosting productivity across Office and workloads like coding, content creation and communication, the value proposition compensates for the fee if it delivers. Still, it does represent an additional SaaS spend that not all organizations will be ready to absorb.
The subscription billing is notable as it diverges from OpenAI’s usage based model for similar capabilities like DALL-E 2 image generation. Copilot Pro emphasizes continual assistance versus one-off content generation. As Copilot usage ramps up amongst organizations, this subscription model could prove very lucrative for Microsoft.
Early Access Launch in 2024
Microsoft initially announced Copilot Pro in 2024 alongside new capabilities. It positioned the service as the next evolution of Copilot to bring professional-grade features to the product for the first time. This included the faster AI image generation, Microsoft 365 integration, and dedicated compute allocation for premium performance.
However, at launch Copilot Pro was only made available in limited preview for select customers in certain countries. Microsoft used a waitlist system similar to OpenAI to manage early access while likely still fine tuning aspects of the tech, packaging and go-to-market. This follows the same playbook used for the original Copilot launch via the Technical Preview program.
Positioning Copilot as an Enterprise Service
The announcement of Microsoft Copilot Pro signals Microsoft’s intent to evolve Copilot from a free developer preview to a premium enterprise software service. By attaching a subscription fee to access higher grade capabilities, Microsoft can invest further in the Copilot roadmap to address corporate and institutional needs.
Here are some of the ways Microsoft is positioning Copilot for the enterprise market with the Pro launch:
IP Protection
The company addressed code originality concerns from the initial Copilot release by explaining the models behind Pro are trained exclusively on Microsoft-owned code and data. This provides clarity around IP embedded in any suggestions or completions surfaced via Copilot Pro.
For governance-sensitive industries like financial services and healthcare who want to leverage AI but must comply with regulations around things like data privacy and code IP, this first-party training data model is a key advantage.
Security
Microsoft touted security advances like support for multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption of data in transit and at rest, and role-based access controls (RBAC). Additional identity and access management controls will govern who can provision and access Copilot functionality across organizations.
Administrative Controls
To support governance at scale, administrators have privileged access to oversee Copilot Pro usage within their tenant. This spans access reviews, monitoring usage levels, configuring allow lists of Microsoft 365 apps, provisioning to users or groups, etc.
Reliability
For Copilot to graduate from technical preview to mission critical enterprise service relied upon by thousands of employees, Microsoft is investing substantially in stability, availability and performance. This includes redundancy across global data centers, load testing at scale, and staffing 24/7 operations teams to manage and enhance the AI models and systems behind Copilot Pro.
The reliability also extends to transparent health dashboards for administrators and a commitment to enterprise grade uptime and SLA policies as Copilot usage grows.
Ongoing Investment Roadmap
Microsoft was clear that Copilot Pro represents just the beginning of integrating large language models across its stacks – from developer tools to Office 365 productivity software to business analytics suites.
The company telegraphed ongoing waves of new Copilot capabilities coming to reimagine workflows for content creators, developers, IT professionals and every information worker role. These AI assistants are only in their infancy in terms of profoundly altering human productivity.
Regular model tweaks will keep accuracy and relevance high while minimizing harmful suggestion rates to under 1 in 20 thousand. And new techniques like few-shot learning allow Copilot models to continuously expand what tasks they can assist with using very small training examples.
Conclusion
The launch of Microsoft Copilot Pro marks a new phase where Copilot grows beyond technical preview origins towards an enterprise-grade service poised to help organizations of all sizes benefit from AI assistance.
Backed by Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and advances in large language model techniques, Copilot Pro promises previously impossible levels of productivity for developers, writers, analysts, office workers and more. While still early days, Microsoft is clearly investing heavily to evolve Copilot into an indispensable part of business software stacks in coming years.
Pricing it as a per user subscription service represents a strategic bet that hands-on AI assistance will prove so valuable that professionals willingly pay monthly fees just like for office suites, sales platforms, communication tools and other modern SaaS apps. And integration with Microsoft 365 provides differentiation versus AI services from other vendors.
Between faster AI image generation, multi-app Microsoft 365 integration and dedicated cloud compute capacity eliminating limits, Copilot Pro aims to take human productivity to new heights across a range of digital workflows. The full impact may take years to realize, but the next era of AI-powered knowledge work is clearly beginning.