Microsoft shares rise after revealing pricing for new AI subscription

Microsoft experienced a surge in its shares, climbing as much as 5.8 per cent on Tuesday, after the company announced pricing for its new artificial intelligence subscription service.

The service, called Copilot, will be available for an additional $30 per month and will offer generative AI capabilities across various Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams, Excel, and Word.

By subscribing to Copilot, enterprise customers may see their monthly prices increase by up to 83 per cent. The AI assistant provides a range of features, such as ranking incoming emails, summarising meetings, analysing spreadsheet data, providing writing prompts and designing presentations, as outlined by Microsoft.

The introduction of this update aligns with the intensified competition among tech giants like Microsoft, Google and IBM, who are vying to offer consumer-driven generative AI tools.

According to Microsoft, Copilot operates based on a user's business data in the Microsoft Graph, encompassing emails, calendar entries, chats, documents and more. The tool adheres to a user's preset security, privacy and compliance policies for Microsoft 365.

Currently, Copilot is undergoing initial testing with 600 enterprise customers, including well-known companies like Goodyear and General Motors. Microsoft has not disclosed a specific timeline for the public rollout of the service.

In addition to the AI subscription service, Microsoft also unveiled a significant update to Bing Chat, its AI chatbot, on Tuesday: visual search. Users can now capture or upload a photo to Bing Chat and request further information about it via the desktop or Bing apps. This enhancement aims to enhance the user experience and expand the capabilities of Bing Chat.