Microsoft's Generative AI program has expanded to include startups and SMBs

This week, Microsoft introduced “copilot” news for professionals and consumers. Copilot, Microsoft's largest generative AI program, now has a paid version with more features and no longer has as many barriers for small businesses.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), that is, entrepreneurs creating their first business, startups, or organizations with fewer than 300 people. In other words, the technology no longer requires a minimum of 300 licenses in commercial plans.

“SMEs are the heart of every community and the lifeblood of local economies. They have a huge impact on the world and the markets they support. In the United States, this category represents 99.9% of businesses and employs nearly half of the workforce, says the giant he co-founded. Bill Gates. In Portugal, the percentage is similar.

Management of small and medium-sized companies believes that communicating with customers takes up the most time (66%), followed by budget management (50%) and administrative tasks (48%), according to an analysis conducted by Microsoft.

On the other hand, among the large multinational companies that use Copilot are Visa, BP, Honda, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, as well as consulting companies Accenture, KPMG or PwC. More than a third (40%) of Fortune 100 companies participated in the early access program for this tool.

“It's more effective for organizations because they work across the entire business data universe, including email, meetings, chats, documents, and more, as well as the web. With natural language instructions like 'Tell my team how we're updating the product strategy.'” Copilot can generate a status update based on Morning meetings, emails and chat conversations,” explains Executive Vice President and Executive Director of Consumer Marketing at Microsoft.

According to Youssef Mahdi, the technology's goal is to allow “every person and every company on the planet to achieve more,” making “this everyday AI companion available to millions of people around the world.” “We have reached another milestone in this mission with more than 5 billion conversations and more than 5 billion photos to date,” the Microsoft CEO revealed.

For individual users, it has become possible to subscribe to the “Pro” version of Copilot which costs $20 per month (about €18.27) and gives you a real Chat bots And algorithms are for everyone at home, because they will be looking for contextual information from different devices (computer, apps, internet and soon mobile phones).

The subscriber, who also has Office 365 installed, also receives the “semantic index” of Office 365 users – thus, having Microsoft 365 is no longer a prerequisite. In practice, this semantic index is a kind of advanced search engine that searches for information and files by keywords. Let's imagine that a company searches for “January” sales report, documents or contacts containing these words will automatically appear, but here semantics and artificial intelligence go further and know that sales reports are produced every month by “Clara Vaz” (name fictitious) ) from the Finance Department and is published in the remaining Excel file in folder X.

Moreover, this Summer Pro allows you to create your own co-pilot, customized to a specific topic, using the soon-to-arrive “GPT Builder” with a series of prompts (instructions that the algorithm gives for the answer you need).