AI - Edu licenses CoPilot/ChatGTP

[Andycat]

Firstly, I'm old, crinkly, and a bit wary of all this..... but,

 

Our new Ops Director and many staff want to use AI tools and I've been tasked with getting costs for licences for either C Pilot (I presume we just ask our licence reseller?) and ChatGPT (His, and therefore their, preference).

 

Has anyone gone down the paid licence front for these products in a UK educational setting?

 

All help gratefully received, my experiences with AI so far have been inaccurate and somewhat limp!

 

Andy

[jnfarmer]

Tell the Ops Director to open up the purse strings, as it will cost a fortune! I don't believe there are any education discounts for AI product...yet.

[TechMonkey]

Not yet, been close. The issue is the licensing seems very convoluted if you go beyond the basic. Also, it is all very expensive, even on Edu licenses.

I wanted to look at making some bots that could ask or answer questions based on the SharePoint library it was in. So, a pupil could ask physics questions in the Physics doc area, staff could ask policy questions in the HR area, etc. But this ended up being around £1100 per year, for the creator and then a license all users needed to access the bots. This was on top of any copilot actual licenses, which was around £25 per person per month.

 

It all kind of ground to a halt after that.

 

I am getting a ChatGTP account to transcribe voicemails to email, so may have a play around with that a bit more. But currently, bigger battles to fight to drag staff kicking and screaming into the 20th Century.

[dhicks]

Our new Ops Director and many staff want to use AI tools and I've been tasked with getting costs for licences for either C Pilot (I presume we just ask our licence reseller?) and ChatGPT (His, and therefore their, preference).

 

Copilot: there was a talk from Microsoft about Copilot at the Edugeek conference last week - I'm guessing the recordings might still be available. I never did really figure out how the licensing worked.

 

ChatGPT: we're a Securley customer, and seemingly they do a suitible-for-schools version of ChatGPT, basically proxying ChatGPT and adding some filtering and so on on the way. It actually looks really handy, and if I understand correctly it's included in our Securley subscription. Only really relevant to Securley customers, of course, but if you're on another filtering system they might have a similar service, might be worth checking, or I don't know if Securley offer the ChatGPT bit as a separate product.

[Rob_D]

According to the DMSystems webinar from a couple of weeks back, CoPilot is an addon for the A3 or A5 edu licenses, at £296.40 (per year/per user)

 

 

If it helps anyone, the license Part no is: CFQ7TTC0MM8R:000K:P1Y:Y

[dhicks]

CoPilot is an addon for the A3 or A5 edu licenses

 

Ah - so you mean we have to first pay for A3 / A5, then pay for CoPilot on top of that?

[Rob_D]

That certainly seems to be the implication of the slide.

[Roberto]

Ah - so you mean we have to first pay for A3 / A5, then pay for CoPilot on top of that?

 

It certainly is for me. Copilot for M365 is a supplimental licence for your base M365 licence, like Teams Premium.

[Rob_D]

It certainly is for me. Copilot for M365 is a supplimental licence for your base M365 licence, like Teams Premium.

 

 

But I guess the question is, can you add CoPilot onto a A1 staff license? The information I have suggests the answer is no, but I could be wrong.

[Andycat]

But I guess the question is, can you add CoPilot onto a A1 staff license? The information I have suggests the answer is no, but I could be wrong.

 

I think you can now, for £300 a year per user!!!

[Dos_Box]

We shall be getting Microsoft's talk about Copilot and pricing etc. from last week's conf up on our YouTube channel this week. It was a very good talk and should have all the information you require in there inc. pricing and capabilities.

TBH, it looks very fully featured and very useful, but given the pricing, I think it'll be management and SLT that will gain most from it until prices settle.

[DavR]

I haven't given it much time yet, but, as I understand it the paid version is to use CoPilot M365 as part of your cloud based M365 offering. Judging by the presentation we saw, it does offer a lot, but also, looks dependent on users using Office 365 native through the web browser.

 

In theory though, I don't think there's an extra license cost for the locally installed version of CoPilot that comes bundles with Windows 11, although of course, features will be more limited. That's the version I'm going to start trialling when I get to it.

[JDawgg]

Also looking into Copilot / ChatGPT

 

The basic Copilot / ChatGPT models are free of charge with limited use. M365 Copilot does a little more as it hooks into your tenancy.

I think the challenge we all face is the ever declining Education budgets, schools want to use AI but can't afford it.

[chazzy2501]

I'm logged in to office 365 and can use co-pilot in bing.. what would buying a licence enable?

 

EDIT: Answered above

[chaplic]

I've deployed a 200 odd user PoC for MS Copilot in a healthcare setting. The initial expectation of the tooling was somewhat off (to join the poc you had to submit a use case) but once people got into it, there was no taking it away. For me, the teams minute taking and actions is worth it alone, for others the ability to do analysis in excel is it, even just the ability to take a word doc and turn into powerpoint. If all your content is on sharepoint then the search is great, being able to ask it things like 'do I get january 2nd off this year' is useful

 

For knowledge workers, if it saves 5% of their time, it's paid for itself.

 

The PoC was done with a proper induction and ongoing tutorials, being a geek I was skeptical but took part in the sessions to handle any questions the trainer couldnt answer. Turns out I learnt loads, but the biggest take away is you cannot just give the tools out an expect people to fully benefit - they need to learn how to create prompts and what works well.

[robintech]

copilot.microsoft.com used to work for us, now it says "coming soon"

 

The Edge sidebar worked while signed into microsoft accounts, up until a few days ago but now says coming soon

 

https://www.bing.com/chat - "Bing Chat is now Copilot"

works if we are not signed into a microsoft account of any kind but you have to open an icognito window each time

 

anyone else experiencing this?

[Andycat]

copilot.cloud.microsoft works for us

[Jaan]

We pay for Google premium, and Gemini is an additional cost.

 

I've been made aware that the Google will be offering discount to education for gemini....more so if you already pay for a Premium tier..... The cost is ludicrous for education...

 

with 25% discount its £15.5k for our staff to use...... it's never going to happen. especially when you get it "free" with a domestic account..... it should be free for education.....esp if you're already on a paid tier......

 

There's not going to be much uptake...... and its going to fall on its Ar*e as a result.

[robintech]

copilot.cloud.microsoft works for us

 

used to work for us but now coming soon, works when logged out though

 

Also looking into Copilot / ChatGPT

 

The basic Copilot / ChatGPT models are free of charge with limited use. M365 Copilot does a little more as it hooks into your tenancy.

I think the challenge we all face is the ever declining Education budgets, schools want to use AI but can't afford it.

 

Is there a source for this I can use when contacting support, closest I can find is the Copilot admin page which has "All users can use ‎Microsoft 365 Chat‎" which might mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat " although "use" isn't clear

 

https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/copilot/discover

To be eligible to use a ‎Copilot‎ license, users must:

Be assigned an eligible license type and have their devices enrolled in the Current or Monthly enterprise channel.

Use a ‎Microsoft Entra ID‎ to sign in to their ‎Microsoft‎ account. Add or sync users to ‎Microsoft Entra ID‎.

All users can use ‎Microsoft 365 Chat‎ or the ‎Copilot‎ mobile app.

[robintech]

Update, problem with ours was Search in Bing set to Secondary/K-12, changing it to Higher Education it starts working in a few seconds and vice versa so they must have some 18+ requirement now

 

https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/MicrosoftSearch/configurations

Microsoft Search in Bing for work or school

Organizations with education and enterprise service plans can select a school or work search experience for their users. We suggest you select the option that aligns with most of your users.

[midweek]

Are we breaching any Microsoft licensing agreements by doing this?

[CHiLL]

Update, problem with ours was Search in Bing set to Secondary/K-12, changing it to Higher Education it starts working in a few seconds and vice versa so they must have some 18+ requirement now

 

https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/Home#/MicrosoftSearch/configurations

Microsoft Search in Bing for work or school

Organizations with education and enterprise service plans can select a school or work search experience for their users. We suggest you select the option that aligns with most of your users.

Thanks for discovering this, we've just encountered this after switching from A1 licenses to A3 licenses. Despite not using Bing as our search, it was the only way to get it working. By default, that setting is set to "School search" and "Primary/Secondary/K-12". The only option to get it working for us is "School search" and "Higher education", with any other combination resulting in "Coming soon".

[jthompson]

We've got a few central things where we've added some AI stuff using the OpenAI PAYG API, rather than using a full end-user license. Where you've got e.g. a centrally shared spreadsheet that needs a bit if AI processing in it on behalf of everyone else, that's the most cost-effective way. That would be the case with the Gemini API, too, I believe. The cost can be a much lower order of magnitude, depending on your requirements.

 

Whilst that probably doesn't help the OP, I thought it might be worth throwing in a mention for using the PAYG APIs, in case that helps anyone out.