We're living in a "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" era for Microsoft's Copilot family of offerings. Yesterday, Microsoft announced what seems at first to be just a product renaming: Copilot Business Chat (popularly shortened as Copilot BizChat) will henceforth be known as Copilot Chat.

In the tech world, each of the major players has one annoying tendency: Google launches great products with a lot of potential, often far ahead of their time, then loses focus and then kills off the product. Apple has a habit of announcing new features as technological breakthroughs when they have in-fact been around for a while; granted Apple's version is more refined and elegant but it's not "new." Microsoft's annoying tendency? Renaming products every 5 minutes. With the exception of Windows and maybe Office (even that has the Microsoft 365 / Office 365 problem), most of their apps, products and services have been renamed at least a few times.

So let's examine what's going on here. For starters, this impacts the Copilot offering for organizations.

What we had:

Until this announcement, organizational users who used Microsoft 365 (i.e., Office apps for business and enterprise users) had two ways of using Copilot:

Toggle between Work to Web experience in Copilot (only available with paid subscription)
  • A free version called Copilot Business Chat (aka Copilot BizChat) with Enterprise Data Protection, which was a secure and business-safe alternative to ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. for general GenAI purposes.
    • It included the ability to upload documents for analyzing, to interpret code, to generate images, and offered Pages for note-taking and collaborating with team members in Copilot.
  • A paid version called Microsoft 365 Copilot for $30/user/month, made up of:
    • This included the free Copilot BizChat, as well as a "Work" version of Copilot BizChat grounded in work data from their Microsoft 365 tenant)
    • Copilot productivity features for Office apps like Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
    • The ability to use custom Agents in Copilot BizChat created by third parties, or by the organization
    • The ability for users to create their own personal Agents for use in Copilot BizChat
    • The ability to create Agents in SharePoint for personal use or to share with a team

The free version had no access to any work data from the Microsoft 365 tenant and no ability to use or create custom Agents.

What's changed:

  • As noted at the very top of this article, Copilot BizChat has been renamed to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (or just Copilot Chat).
  • Addition of new features at no cost:
    • Discover and pin agents
    • Create custom agents
    • Create SharePoint agents
    • Use custom agents grounded in web data
    • Upload images
  • Addition of two metered Pay-As-You-Go features:
    • Use custom agents ground in work data (data from Microsoft 365 tenant)
    • Use autonomous custom agents

Also worth noting is that Microsoft has taken the opportunity to highlight that autonomous agents will also a metered Pay-As-You-Go feature for paid users of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The feature is currently in preview in Copilot Studio.

Both the free and paid versions of Copilot Chat will be powered by the popular GPT-4o LLM by OpenAI.

Oh, and now there's a short and sweet URL to get to Copilot Chat: https://m365copilot.com

Note: As of the time of this writing, these new features are not yet available in most tenants. I have checked 3 different M365 tenants I have access to, and they're not rolled out yet. As with most features, we can expect a staggered rollout over the coming weeks or months.

Below is a full comparison table of all the features available in each of the two options:

Image Source: Microsoft

For more information on Copilot for Microsoft 365 licensing, check out this article right here on OnlyCopilotFans.com.

This reminds me… Now I've got to go update all the articles that have BizChat to say Copilot Chat. Fun times!