Microsoft brings affordable AI power with $20 Copilot Pro subscription

Individuals can avail services like text-drafting, and number-crunching AI assistant after purchasing Copilot Pro subscription
An undated image of Microsoft Office. — Pixabay
An undated image of Microsoft Office. — Pixabay

Microsoft, months after launching a free artificial intelligence (AI) Copilot for Its Bing search engine last year, announced its decision to offer consumers a subscription (Copilot Pro) for $20 per month.

Individuals can avail services like text-drafting, and number-crunching AI assistant to Microsoft’s widely used applications including Word and Excel, and it will give purchases access to new tools and AI models such as GPT-4 Turbo.

Moreover, the requirement of a 300-person minimum workforce set for the enterprise version of the software has also been revoked, making the security control and Microsoft Teams upgrade that comes with the $0 per month per-user Copilot available to smaller businesses.

Read more: Microsoft is up to Copilot Pro — Here's what to expect

In an interview, Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro said that the company now expects virtually all of its business customers to sign up.

He said: “I can’t imagine a commercial organisation out there that will not buy at least a seat of Copilot to see what it’s all about.”

It should be noted that Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft are competing in marketing artificial intelligence for productivity and cloud software to business customers.

Moreover, the Copilot Pro is entering an increasingly competitive consumer market. ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI also announced a $ 20-per-month subscription nearly a year ago called ChatGPT Plus that gives early access to AI features and new tools.