Microsoft 365 Copilot launches in November

Microsoft’s 365 Copilot AI assistant will be available starting on November 1st for Microsoft 365 customers on certain business and enterprise plans. But the add-on isn’t free: the company announced in July it would be charging a $30 per month premium per user for access to the feature, which almost doubles the total price of a subscription for businesses on some lower-end plans.

Copilot is like a modern-day Clippy sans anthropomorphic animated paperclip. With it, business users can sum up documents or outsource email creation to their AI helper. It can also create wholly new Word projects using information from other files or offer real-time highlights from Teams meetings. It can even tell you how it did something in Excel after you ask it to visualize data for you or make projections.

Copilot’s debut comes shortly after Google released its own AI tools, called Duet AI, in Google Workspace, its analog for 365. It’s charging the same amount for access — $30 per person per month — and the feature offers many of the same benefits as Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced today that it’s launching a version of Copilot across all of its apps and services, so even if you don’t have 365 Copilot, you’ll still see similar features pop up elsewhere.