Copilot is Microsoft's AI for productivity, and it continues to expand with Microsoft's AI goals. Today, about a dozen Copilot-branded products power features across Microsoft apps and services, such as summaries in Microsoft Outlook and transcripts in Microsoft Teams.

This is in addition to Microsoft's own GitHub-owned Copilot tool for code generation and Copilot, which is on Windows and the web and acts as a general assistant.

In this post, we will explain the different features of Microsoft Copilot and the differences between the premium and free versions. Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, is a feature in Microsoft's search engine, Bing, Windows 10, Windows 11 And the Microsoft Edge sidebar is built in. (Newer computers even have a dedicated button to launch Copilot.) There are also standalone Copilot apps for Android and iOS, and a Telegram room within the app.

Powered by optimized versions of OpenAI models (OpenAI and Microsoft work closely together), Copilot can perform a wide range of tasks expressed in natural language, such as writing poetry and articles, translating text into other languages, and summarizing resources from the web (although it may be error-prone).

Like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Copilot can search the web for up-to-date information (in Copilot, this is done through Bing). It may make mistakes from time to time, but for timely requests, access to search results can give Copilot an advantage over offline bots like Anthropic's Claude.

Copilot can create images using Image Creator, Microsoft's image creation tool based on OpenAI's DALL-E 3 model. It can also create songs through integration with Suno, an AI music creation platform. Typing phrases like "create a picture of a zebra" or "create a song with a jazz beat" into Copilot will activate the corresponding tool.

When it comes to integrations, Copilot supports plugins for third-party apps and websites. There are plugins for Instacart (for meal planning and cooking queries), Kayak (for trip planning), OpenTable (for restaurant reservations), and Shopify, among other examples. More plugins are added regularly.

Copilot also powers Copilot Pages, an embeddable digital canvas that lets users edit and share content created with Copilot. Paid customers (more details below) have access to BizChat, a business hub that connects to Pages and can pull data from the web (and work files) to help create project plans, meeting notes, proposals, and more.

Which Windows settings can Copilot control?

In Windows 11 (but not necessarily in Windows 10), Copilot can control some settings and functions, acting as a kind of digital butler.

With Copilot, whether by typing or using Windows 11's speech recognition feature, users can perform actions such as turning battery saver on or off, displaying device and system information, launching live captions, displaying the device's IP address, and emptying the Recycle Bin. An option in the Copilot experience in Windows 11 switches between "work" and "web" modes, the former of which has the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Brings Copilot into the Windows interface.

What is Copilot Pro?

Copilot Pro is Microsoft's premium product for Copilot, priced at $20 per month.

Copilot Pro customers get priority access to the most powerful OpenAI models (like o1) during peak usage times. Some Copilot features are only available with a Pro subscription, such as higher resolution images from Image Creator.

Copilot Pro also gives users access to productive AI functions in the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.

In Word and OneNote, Copilot can write, edit, summarize, and produce text. In Excel and PowerPoint, Copilot can turn natural language commands into presentations and visualizations (optionally based on data from files and templates). And in Outlook, Copilot can help draft emails and adjust their length or tone.

More features are coming soon in Microsoft's Copilot Wave 2 update.

In PowerPoint, Copilot will soon import company-approved images from a SharePoint library, while Outlook will have a “Prioritize My Inbox” feature that provides a summary of each email (and highlights key points like who you’ve been in contact with the most). In late 2024, Outlook users will also be able to “train” Copilot which topics, keywords, and people it’s interested in so that those emails are always marked as high priority.

In Excel, Copilot can format data, create graphs, create pivot tables, and guide users in creating new formulas and macros. It can also use the Python programming language for advanced data analysis – users can describe tasks like forecasting, risk analysis, and data visualization in natural language, and Copilot converts the text into the Python code needed to perform those tasks.

A future version of Copilot in Word will let you quickly import data from outside Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents, as well as emails, encrypted documents, and meetings. Elsewhere, in OneDrive, Copilot can create summaries, show statistics about files, and compare differences between files.

Beyond Microsoft 365 updates, Copilot Pro subscribers have access to landscape formatting options and 100 “speed boosts” per day in Image Creator (compared to just 15 for free users) to speed up the image production process.

It's important to note that Copilot Pro does not come with Copilot in Teams, a feature in Microsoft Teams that provides real-time summaries and actionable tasks, and does things like identify people to follow up with. Copilot in Teams is exclusive to enterprise-level Copilot customers, meaning only those with an enterprise-level Microsoft 365 license or equivalent have access to it.

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Different from the consumer version of Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot is a set of productive AI add-ons for Microsoft 365 that focuses more on business applications.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is available for $30 per user per month to customers with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license. It offers many of the same capabilities in the Microsoft 365 family of apps as Copilot Pro, but with the addition of “enterprise-grade data protection” and Semantic Index, a backend system that maps an organization’s data and content to help Copilot deliver more personalized responses.

Copilot in Microsoft Planner

Microsoft recently launched Microsoft 365 Chat, a tool that extracts information from the content of Microsoft 365 apps (such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations) to answer questions.

Here is a list of some other Copilots and their skills:

• Copilot in Power Pages can create text, forms, chatbots, and web page layouts, and is able to create and edit images and website design themes.

• Copilot for Sales can help write email responses to customers or perform sales-related tasks like sending Teams meeting summaries via Outlook.

• Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can identify potential issues such as weather, financial, and geographic conditions that may impact supply chain processes.

• Copilot for Services can write answers to customer questions via chat or email and provide a chat experience for customer service representatives that leverages knowledge bases and case histories.

• Copilot for Azure can recommend configurations for applications and environments hosted in Microsoft Azure, and help troubleshoot issues and identify solutions.

• Copilot for Security seeks to summarize and “understand” different types of cyber threats.

• Copilot in Fabric helps with data exploration, preparation, and visualization.

• Copilot in Intune helps manage security policies and settings and troubleshoot devices.

• Team Copilot can help manage agendas in Teams and extends to Loop and Planner to create and assign tasks, track deadlines, and notify team members when their input is needed.

Note that some Microsoft Copilots, such as Copilot in Business Central, are included in the base software licenses and do not require additional fees. Others, such as Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Services, have an additional cost of $20 per user per month, or $50 per user per month if you do not have an active Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription.

Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio is a dashboard that allows customers to give Microsoft 365 Copilot access to data in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and other databases and repositories through pre-built connections or connections they create themselves. Through Copilot Studio, customers can build frameworks for Copilots and create and publish their own custom “copilots.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers can use Copilot Studio to create their own custom Copilots, describing them in natural language. Copilots can be filtered to specific data sets for specific teams or users, or connected to an automation, plugin, or third-party service to trigger actions or set up a workflow. Copilot Studio is also where customers can build what Microsoft calls Copilot agents. These AI bots — which can be mentioned in Outlook and Teams with the @ symbol — use memory and context knowledge to navigate various business processes, learn from user feedback, and ask for help when they encounter situations they don’t know how to handle.

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is a set of tools for code generation and support for development tasks. GitHub Copilot installs as a plugin for integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains, or can be used in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.

The generative AI model behind GitHub Copilot has been trained on billions of lines of code in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of other programming languages — many of which are available on GitHub and publicly available. As you write code, GitHub Copilot provides live code suggestions, and you can choose to accept or reject them.

GitHub Copilot can also translate code into natural language descriptions, and Copilot plugins allow developers to extend Copilot with third-party skills.

GitHub Copilot is free for students and “verified contributors” to open source projects and teachers. For individuals, it’s $10 per month. For business customers, it’s $19 per month per user. And for enterprise customers, it’s $39 per month per user.

Copilot problems

Due to the complexity and difficult nature of today's generative AI technologies, Microsoft's Copilots have some problems.

Models sometimes make mistakes when summarizing or answering questions because they tend to ramble, including when summarizing meetings. For example, a report from the Wall Street Journal found that for one early adopter who used Copilot for Teams meetings, Copilot had invented participants and indicated that the calls were about topics that were not discussed at all.

In the case of GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it may produce unsafe coding patterns, bugs, and references to outdated APIs or incomplete code terminology in its training data. The code that Copilot suggests may not always compile or run — or even make sense.

Security and privacy concerns have also cast a shadow over Copilot. But perhaps the biggest problem is the unresolved question of fair use.

Like most generative AI models, the models used in Microsoft Copilots are trained on public data, some of which may be copyrighted or under limited licenses. Microsoft — like others — argues that fair use principles protect it from copyright claims. But that hasn’t stopped data owners from filing class-action lawsuits against the company, GitHub, OpenAI, and others for what they say are clear violations of licenses and intellectual property rights.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Microsoft 365 Copilot suitable for?

Copilot is designed for small and large businesses and individual users who want to improve their efficiency in Microsoft 365. The service is now available to Enterprise, SMB, and personal users worldwide.

How does Microsoft 365 Copilot work?

Copilot combines natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to help users understand and generate text, summarize content, and automate workflows. It works across Microsoft 365 apps and maintains enterprise-level security and compliance.

Is it safe to use Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Yes, Copilot follows Microsoft security and compliance standards, including data encryption, access control, and compliance with global regulations. EU users benefit from data residency protections that ensure data processing within the EU data border.

Summary