What’s the Difference Between Microsoft’s Copilots?

Comparing the Differences of Microsoft’s Copilots

 

Microsoft Copilot

Price: Free

Availability: Available now on Windows 11, in the Microsoft Edge browser, via copilot.microsoft.com

Key Uses: Answering questions, summarising content, searching the internet, generating images

Summary: Microsoft Copilot, distinct from Copilot for 365, is a pioneering AI-powered chatbot by Microsoft, capitalising on advanced large language models to significantly enhance productivity, foster creativity, and simplify information comprehension through an intuitive chat interface. Initially introduced as Bing Chat in February 2023, it is seamlessly integrated within Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge, marking Microsoft’s strategic shift towards AI-driven assistance and serving as the successor to the phased-out Cortana.

Further embedding itself into the fabric of daily computing, Microsoft Copilot has been adeptly incorporated into Windows 11, offering users an enriched experience aimed at boosting their productivity and creativity. Whether seeking concrete answers, creative inspiration, or pragmatic solutions for an array of questions, projects, and tasks, Copilot stands as a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to leveraging AI technology to empower users in navigating and managing their digital environment more effectively. But what’s the different between this and Microsoft’s other Copilots?

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Price: £24.70 per user, per month (annual committment)

Availability: Available now for Business and Enterprise customers

Key Uses: Generate content in Word, create PowerPoint presentations, analyse data in Excel, draft emails in Outlook, generate meeting summaries in Teams.

Summary: Copilot for 365 directly enhances productivity within the Microsoft 365 suite by automating and simplifying tasks across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It generates content, analyses data, designs presentations, manages emails, and facilitates collaboration, all through natural language commands. This tool streamlines document creation, spreadsheet analysis, and communication, enabling users to efficiently tackle complex projects and everyday tasks. Users must have a Business Standard, Business Premium, or E3/E5 subscription to use Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft Copilot Pro

Price: £19.00 per user, per month

Availability: Available now for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers

Key Uses: Generate content in Word, create PowerPoint presentations, analyse data in Excel, draft emails in Outlook, generate meeting summaries in Teams.

Summary: Copilot Pro is a cross between Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. It offers enhanced features over the free Copilot service and adds AI capabilities to the Microsoft 365 apps, but it’s designed for individuals, not businesses. It offers subscribers priority access to advanced AI models like GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, ensuring faster response times and content creation, including AI-powered image creation with DALL-E 3. Designed to work in conjunction with a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, Copilot Pro extends its capabilities to key Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, enabling features like drafting and summarising documents in Word, generating outlines and designing slides in PowerPoint, managing emails in Outlook, and organising notes in OneNote. Additionally, subscribers receive 100 boosts per day for AI image creation, significantly enhancing their creative output​​​​. Here again, understanding what’s the difference between Microsoft’s Copilots, particularly Copilot Pro’s individual-focused approach versus the broader or business-centric versions, is crucial.

Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365

Price: Varies

Availability: Available now across various Dynamics 365 applications

Key Uses: Enhancing productivity and efficiency in customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), automating tasks, generating ideas, providing insights using natural language, and improving customer service and sales processes.

Copilot for Dynamics 365 represents a significant leap in leveraging AI to enrich employee experiences and streamline operations across CRM and ERP systems. It empowers employees to automate routine tasks, generate creative ideas, and derive insights using natural language, thereby focusing on high-value activities. For sales teams, it optimises seller productivity by enabling automation of sales processes and augmenting seller actions with AI-powered insights. In customer service, it offers capabilities like summarising cases and conversations, composing emails or chat responses, and providing quick access to knowledge base sources. Marketing teams benefit from AI-driven customer insights, segment suggestions, and content creation tools, enhancing the personalisation and efficiency of marketing campaigns. Additionally, it supports various operations such as field service, project management, finance, and supply chain management by providing AI-assisted insights and automations to streamline workflows, improve decision-making, and enhance customer engagement​​​​​​.

Copilot for Power Platform

Price: Free

Availability: Copilot is generally available in Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate.

Key Uses: In Power Automate – build, edit, and extend workflows using natural language and get help from AI powered chat. In Power Apps – build enterprise-grade applications faster and more easily with generative AI. In Power BI – use AI to illuminate hidden patterns, opportunities, and anomalies in your data.

Summary: Copilot for Power Platform is an AI-powered assistant designed to facilitate the creation of intelligent apps within the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem. By leveraging large language models, it accelerates the development process, enabling users to build apps, automate workflows, and create virtual agents through conversational inputs. For app development in Power Apps, Copilot simplifies the process from data integration to app publishing, offering suggestions based on your data and preferences, ensuring that applications are both efficient and aligned with your business needs. Importantly, Copilot operates within a secure environment, ensuring that data and information are processed locally and in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles.

Microsoft Security Copilot

Price: Unconfirmed.

Availability: Currently available in an Early Access Program for commercial customers.

Key Uses: Incident response, threat hunting, intelligence gathering, posture management, security reporting.

Summary: Microsoft Security Copilot is a generative AI-powered security solution designed to enhance the efficiency and capabilities of security professionals. It operates at machine speed and scale, providing a natural language, assistive copilot experience for a wide range of security scenarios including incident response, threat hunting, and security posture management. Security Copilot leverages OpenAI architecture and security-specific plugins to generate responses, offering wide visibility into threats and the opportunity to extend its functionalities. It integrates with Microsoft’s security portfolio products such as Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Intune, as well as with third-party services like ServiceNow. The solution is focused on improving security outcomes while adhering to responsible AI principles​​​​.

GitHub Copilot

Price: From £7.60 per user, per month (with annual commitment)

Availability: Available now for individual developers and businesses

Key Uses: Code suggestions, function generation, test acceleration, security vulnerability identification

Summary: GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant that supports a multitude of programming tasks across various languages and IDEs. It is designed to enhance developer productivity by offering code completions, generating function and line suggestions, and providing chat and security vulnerability filtering. For individual developers, Copilot is priced at approximately £7.60 per month (or £76 annually), offering a 30-day free trial. The Business plan, targeted at organizational use, stands at approximately £14.40 per user per month, including advanced features such as chat support in IDE, CLI assistance, and IP indemnity, among others. An Enterprise option is also available at approximately £29.60 per user per month, requiring a GitHub Enterprise Cloud subscription, and includes personalized chat features, documentation search and summarization, and enhanced code review capabilities. GitHub Copilot is accessible for verified students, teachers, and open-source project maintainers at no cost, promoting educational and community development use.

 

Conclusion

Understanding the diversity and specificity of the Microsoft’s different Copilot offerings reveals a strategic vision aimed at leveraging AI to enhance productivity, creativity, and security across a broad spectrum of professional and personal computing environments. From the freely accessible Microsoft Copilot, which introduces AI-powered chat capabilities into daily computing via Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge, to 365 Copilot’s business-oriented enhancements for Microsoft 365 suite users, each variant is designed with distinct use cases and user bases in mind. Copilot Pro bridges these worlds, offering advanced AI features for individual Microsoft 365 subscribers, while GitHub Copilot targets developers with AI-assisted coding. Furthermore, specialized versions like Copilot for Dynamics 365 and Copilot for Power Platform cater to specific professional needs in CRM, ERP, and app development, respectively. Microsoft Security Copilot’s focus on cybersecurity underscores the importance of AI in safeguarding digital assets.

This comprehensive approach underscores Microsoft’s commitment to embedding AI across its product range, ensuring that whether one is coding, managing corporate resources, or simply browsing the web, there’s a Copilot designed to make the task more efficient and intuitive. Hopefully, you will now be able to understand the difference between Microsoft’s Copilots: a suite of tools poised to redefine our interaction with technology, tailored to meet diverse needs across the digital landscape.

 

About Emerge Digital

Emerge Digital is a technology and digital innovation business and Managed Services Provider (MSP) which provides solutions to SMEs that drive efficiency, competitiveness, and profit. Using comprehensive solutions, including outsourced IT support, cyber security, cloud infrastructure, and innovative technologies like process automation, data visualisation and AI – Emerge Digital enables businesses to invest in technology that supports them in achieving their goals.