CoPilot for Microsoft 365

[mitchell1981]

Hi All,

 

I was keen to give CoPilot for Microsoft 365 / Office a go when it was released, but I'm not seeing how to purchase it, or do schools just have to wait longer?

 

It's not showing in the purchase services section of my Admin Portal.

 

Is this because we don't have any E3 / E5 licences. I assumed that A3 / A5 would also be acceptable but perhaps they are not.

 

Does anyone know how we buy it? I only really want one licence to have a go with.

 

Thanks.

[TechMonkey]

Last I heard Copilot was £23 per user per month.

 

Makes it fairly limited in my opinion.

[Ditto]

Funnily enough my LM mentioned this product (without recalling it's name) just an hour ago. Apparently our IT provider suggested it could be used with Excel data and help with reporting and gleaning insights. I was suitably cynical about that, but stayed as open minded as possible! We don't have a single dashboard or automated report in operation and anything beyond trivial number requires Excel data extractions and various machinations as our main information system is terrible. Data quality is really poor as the system has very little flexibility and almost no ways of enforcing data business rules. They idea was to 'play around' with the tool and see what it offers. However, no costs were indicated and once that is confirmed, I think this will be dropped pronto! For clarity, we are not a school, but a charity that works a lot with schools.

[RobFuller]

It's not released to Education tenants yet, Microsoft are working on better controls for education which is a good thing just mean you got to wait a little longer.

[Theblacksheep]

£25 a month AI tools from google/openai and MS is DOA for education.

[RobFuller]

There is no official line on Copilot availability and licensing in Edu Tenants. (This is direct from Microsoft Education Team). Bing Chat for faculty is A3/5 so I would have guess A3 as a minimum but wouldn’t be surprised if it was A5. A lot of confusion around the minimum count which as been applied for business tenants but again no official line…

[Cw2k]

Last I heard Copilot was £23 per user per month.

 

Makes it fairly limited in my opinion.

 

Around that and currently also a minimum 300 seats required.

[Roberto]

The £23/person/month limit isn't too onerous for business at least. Now that it's in GA I can say I've been involved in deploying copilot the past 6 months or so and it has several use cases where it can easily return more than £1/person/day of value for a business. Imagine a Teams meeting with several attendees and copilot reducing an hour long meeting to 30 mins, or a 30 mins meeting to a 15-min meeting or an email. If your organisation works out of the Microsoft cloud using modern tools, it effectively gives each copilot user a personal assistant.

 

Want to summarise your emails after a week off? Ask copilot. Want to know what the action items were for everyone in the last meeting? Copilot was taking minutes, it has that ready for you. And no-one had to take the minutes themselves and end up being less engaged in the meeting itself. Got neurodivergent users who struggle with attention in meetings or with starting a document with a blank sheet? Copilot has both of those people's back for them (and I've seen hard evidence of this from other copilot customers, this isn't just me parrotting Microsoft fluff).

 

The Excel, Powerpoint and Word tools are fantastic. I'm actually less convinced about the Outlook tools but then I'm already comfortable with writing flowery language in emails and when I'm rude in an email it's usually because I intended to be.

 

I don't think its essential though, if I'm being honest, and given the constraints I'd certainly struggle to see education get sufficient value from it.

Edited November 6, 2023 by Roberto

[mitchell1981]

Thanks everyone. Very interesting. I hope they drop the 300 seat requirement when they release it for Education tenants. We don't even have that many staff, and I doubt many schools do unless you are in a Trust that shares a single tenant.

 

I'm certainly getting a lot of junk mail at the moment from companies promoting their 'Get Ready for Copilot' events and seminars, so I assume it's coming fairly soon.

[Ditto]

The £23/person/month limit isn't too onerous for business at least. Now that it's in GA I can say I've been involved in deploying copilot the past 6 months or so and it has several use cases where it can easily return more than £1/person/day of value for a business. Imagine a Teams meeting with several attendees and copilot reducing an hour long meeting to 30 mins, or a 30 mins meeting to a 15-min meeting or an email. If your organisation works out of the Microsoft cloud using modern tools, it effectively gives each copilot user a personal assistant.

 

Want to summarise your emails after a week off? Ask copilot. Want to know what the action items were for everyone in the last meeting? Copilot was taking minutes, it has that ready for you. And no-one had to take the minutes themselves and end up being less engaged in the meeting itself. Got neurodivergent users who struggle with attention in meetings or with starting a document with a blank sheet? Copilot has both of those people's back for them (and I've seen hard evidence of this from other copilot customers, this isn't just me parrotting Microsoft fluff).

 

The Excel, Powerpoint and Word tools are fantastic. I'm actually less convinced about the Outlook tools but then I'm already comfortable with writing flowery language in emails and when I'm rude in an email it's usually because I intended to be.

 

I don't think its essential though, if I'm being honest, and given the constraints I'd certainly struggle to see education get sufficient value from it.

I'm interested in further insight on the Excel side of things. What sort of datasets have you seen it working on and what has it come up with?

[Roberto]

I'm interested in further insight on the Excel side of things. What sort of datasets have you seen it working on and what has it come up with?

 

I think it can help with writing (or at least refining) formulas to get a task done. Primarily it's good at helping you find trends in data, pick out key trends to highlight or detail to focus when building a pivot table.

[Max_Power]

Seems to be visible now in my A5 licence details - but cant access it in any applications as of yet. Is that right?

[Cw2k]

Seems to be visible now in my A5 licence details - but cant access it in any applications as of yet. Is that right?

 

Isn’t that just Bing Chat Enterprise as it was rebranded as Microsoft Copilot at Ignite

[Max_Power]

Isn’t that just Bing Chat Enterprise as it was rebranded as Microsoft Copilot at Ignite

 

Ahhh not sure... under A5 licence its listed as CoPilot. It's not listed under our A3 licences.

[Cw2k]

Ahhh not sure... under A5 licence its listed as CoPilot. It's not listed under our A3 licences.

 

We have Copilot listed under our A3 licenses

[Max_Power]

We have Copilot listed under our A3 licenses

 

How odd. Not to worry. Maybe it is simply Bing Chat

[mitchell1981]

Seeing this as an option now: Microsoft Copilot Studio for Faculty

 

£90 per licence per month! Not clear what it actually is but I think it's more of a programming thing for creating your own AI tools.

[Edu-IT]

How odd. Not to worry. Maybe it is simply Bing Chat

Are you seeing it within the apps (Word, Outlook etc)?

[steve]

"Beginning on January 1, 2024, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be generally available for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty for $30 per user per month with a 300-seat minimum per tenant"

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/copilot-for-microsoft-365/announcing-updates-to-copilot-for-microsoft-365-availability/ba-p/4007075

[Edu-IT]

Not cheap then!

[Roberto]

Not cheap then!

 

Depends how you define ‘cheap’. I talked about this earlier in the thread but as I said there, I can easily break down and justify the daily price per person for 300 people without them opening any app besides Teams. But the sticker shock of the limits is huge and I think they may have misjudged it’s usefulness in some customer bases at that price.

Edited December 14, 2023 by Roberto

[midweek]

That reads like a minimum of 300 faculty costing $108,000 per year and only for over 18s. Further Edu only then.

[Max_Power]

So it's the announcement we've been waiting for.... and one we probably expected. It may well be out of reach financially for schools unless they are adjusting their pricing model as they release it within other educational settings?

[mitchell1981]

That's disappointly insane pricing! I posted a comment on there to say so, but it may get removed! I assume they will have no customers at all in schools then. What school can afford £85,000 a year in extra licencing costs! I feel like the cost per user is acceptable, but the seat requirements are not appropriate for education. We don't even have enough people to use all those licences so more than half the money would go on nothing at all!

 

Can only assume this is aimed solely at universities, and private schools. I suppose it might work for a large MAT if you are allowed to buy it on that basis but in our MAT we all licence Microsoft separately.

[TechMonkey]

Can only assume this is aimed solely at universities, and private schools. I suppose it might work for a large MAT if you are allowed to buy it on that basis but in our MAT we all licence Microsoft separately.

 

I very much doubt any but the top 0.5% top private schools would be able to afford that and most of them don't have 300 staff. Universities I can see and large Colleges maybe.

 

Once MS have recouped a fair chunk of change I can see the cost coming down, but probably slowly.