Copilot, Microsoft's initiative in generative AI to enhance productivity, continues to grow and expand alongside Microsoft's AI ambitions. There are now about a dozen Copilot-branded products that power various features in Microsoft software and services, including summarization in Microsoft Outlook and transcription in Microsoft Teams.
This is in addition to the Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot tool for code generation, and Copilot, which runs on Windows and the web, and acts as a general-purpose assistant like OpenAI's ChatGPT rather than a point solution.
This article describes the different Microsoft Copilot offerings available and their features, highlighting the key differences between them.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Formerly known as Bing Chat, Microsoft Copilot is built into Microsoft's search engine, Bing, as well as into Windows 10, Windows 11, and the Microsoft Edge sidebar (newer PCs even have a dedicated keyboard key to launch Copilot.) There's also a standalone Copilot app for Android and iOS, as well as a Telegram room within the app.
Image credit: Microsoft
Copilot is powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI's models (OpenAI and Microsoft have a close collaboration) and can perform a variety of tasks written in natural language, such as writing poems or essays, translating text into other languages, and summarizing (albeit imperfectly) sources on the web.
Copilot, like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, can browse the web (through Bing, in Copilot's case) for up-to-date information. Although it may search for the wrong information, for timely queries, the accessibility of search results gives Copilot an advantage over offline bots like Anthropic's Claude.
Copilot can create images by tapping into Image Creator, Microsoft's image generator built on OpenAI's DALL-E 3 model, and it can also generate songs through integration with Suno, an AI music generation platform. Just type something like “create a picture of a zebra” or “generate a song with a jazz rhythm” into Copilot and it will surface relevant tools.
Image credit: Microsoft
Speaking of integrations, Copilot supports plugins for third-party apps and websites. There are plugins for Instacart (for meal planning and cooking-related questions), Kayak (for travel planning), OpenTable (for restaurant reservations), Shopify, and more, with more being added regularly.
What Windows settings can Copilot control?
In Windows 11 (not necessarily Windows 10), Copilot can control certain settings and features, acting as a kind of digital concierge.
Copilot allows users to type or use the speech recognition capabilities of Windows 11 to perform actions on their PC, such as turning battery saver on or off, viewing device and system information, launching live captions, viewing the PC's IP address, and emptying the Recycle Bin.
Copilot for Windows. Image courtesy of Microsoft
The Copilot experience toggle in Windows 11 lets you switch between “Work” and “Web” modes. In Work mode, Copilot's Microsoft 365 features are exposed in the Windows interface. More on this below.
What is Copilot Pro?
Copilot Pro is Microsoft's premium Copilot product, available for $20 per month, and is similar in some ways to competing generative AI chatbot plans like OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus and Google's Google One AI Premium, but not exactly the same.
Copilot Pro customers have priority access to the most high-performing OpenAI models (such as GPT-4o) at peak times, and some Copilot features, such as high-resolution images in Image Creator, are only accessible with a Pro subscription.
Copilot Pro gives users access to AI-generated capabilities in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. In Word and OneNote, Copilot can write, edit, summarize and generate text; in Excel and PowerPoint, Copilot can turn natural language prompts into presentations and visualizations; and in Outlook, you can draft email responses with toggles to adjust length and tone.
If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan, these features are available in the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote desktop apps, otherwise they are only available in the web versions of these Microsoft 365 apps.
Image credit: Microsoft
In addition to the Microsoft 365 upgrade, Copilot Pro subscribers also get 100 “boosts” per day in Image Creator (free users only get 15 per day) to speed up the image generation process, and get landscape formatting options.
Importantly, Copilot Pro does not come with Copilot in Teams, the Copilot feature in Microsoft Teams that provides real-time overviews and action items while handling tasks like identifying people to follow up with and creating meeting agendas. Copilot in Teams is exclusive to enterprise Copilot customers, i.e. customers with an enterprise-class (or equivalent) Microsoft 365 license.
What is Copilot for Microsoft 365?
Separate from the consumer Copilot SKU is Copilot for Microsoft 365, a generative AI add-on suite for Microsoft 365 that focuses on business applications.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is priced at $30 per user per month and is only available to customers with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license. It offers many of the same features as Copilot Pro across the Microsoft 365 family of apps, but adds “enterprise-grade data protection” and Semantic Index, a back-end system that creates a map of the data and content in your organization and enables Copilot to provide more personalized responses.
Team Copilot in Planner. Image courtesy of Microsoft
For example, Microsoft recently launched Microsoft 365 Chat, a Copilot for Microsoft 365 tool that answers questions by pulling information from content across Microsoft 365 apps (Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, etc.) Meanwhile, in Excel, Copilot for Microsoft 365 can format data, create charts, generate pivot tables, guide you through creating formulas and macros, and more.
There are many other co-pilots available. Here is a partial list of them and their “skills”:
Copilot in Power Pages can generate text, forms, chatbots, and web page layouts, as well as create and edit images and site design themes. Copilot for Sales helps you perform sales-related tasks such as composing email responses to customers and sending Teams meeting summaries via Outlook. Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can proactively flag weather, financial, geography, and other issues that may impact your supply chain processes. Copilot for Service can draft responses to customer inquiries via chat and email, and provide customer service agents with a chat experience that draws from your knowledge base and case history. Copilot for Azure can suggest configurations for apps and environments hosted in Microsoft Azure, and help with troubleshooting by identifying potential issues and solutions. Copilot for Security aims to summarize and “make sense” of various forms of cyber threat intelligence. Copilot in Fabric helps you explore, integrate, transform, prepare, and visualize your data. Copilot in Intune helps manage security policies and settings and troubleshoot device issues. Team Copilot helps manage meeting agendas in Teams and can extend to Loop and Planner to create and assign tasks, track deadlines, and notify team members when their input is needed.
Some Microsoft Copilot offerings, such as Copilot in Business Central, are included in the base software license at no extra cost, while others, such as Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, cost an additional $20 per user/month or $50 per user/month without a Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscription.
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio is a dashboard that allows customers to enable Copilot for Microsoft 365 to access data in their own or third-party customer relationship management software, enterprise resource management systems, and other databases and repositories using pre-built or custom-built connectors. Through Copilot Studio, customers can build guardrails for Copilot and create and publish their own customized “copilots.”
Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers can tap into Copilot Studio to create their own Copilot by writing in natural language, which can be filtered to specific datasets for specific teams or users, and can connect to automations, plugins, or third-party services to initiate actions and workflows.
Image credit: Microsoft
Copilot Studio also allows customers to create what Microsoft calls “Copilot agents.” These AI bots use memory and contextual knowledge to navigate different business workflows, learning from user feedback and asking for help when they come across a situation they don't know how to handle.
What is GitHub Copilot?
Not to be confused with other Copilot offerings in the Microsoft portfolio, GitHub Copilot is a set of tools for generating code and supporting general programming activities. GitHub Copilot can be installed as an extension for IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains, or used in the cloud using GitHub Codespaces.
GitHub Copilot's underlying generative AI models are trained on billions of lines of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and many other programming languages, many of which are hosted and publicly available on GitHub. As you write code, GitHub Copilot suggests code as you type, and you can review suggestions in sequence and accept or reject them.
GitHub Copilot can also convert code into natural language descriptions, and Copilot Extensions allow developers to extend Copilot with third-party skills.
Image credit: GitHub
GitHub Copilot is free for students and “verified” open source contributors and educators, $10 per month for individuals, $19 per user per month for business customers, and $39 per user per month for enterprises.
Individual, business, and enterprise subscribers can use Copilot Chat with GitHub Copilot, a chatbot-like flow that is aware of the overall context of the code you're working on and can answer questions about that code. In addition to answering coding questions, Chat helps developers fix errors and bugs and address security issues through code analysis.
Image credit: GitHub
GitHub Copilot plans for Enterprise and Business include license management, IP indemnification, org-wide policy management, and additional privacy features. Enterprise customers can customize their codebase and knowledge base, fine-tune the underlying model, and access Copilot through Microsoft Copilot on the web and use Copilot Chat on GitHub.com.
In April, GitHub launched Copilot Workspace, a type of AI-powered software engineering. The Workspace provides a development environment that uses AI-powered agents to help you brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language.
Copilot issues
The complex and challenging nature of today's generative AI techniques presents problems for Microsoft's Copilot.
The model is prone to hallucinations, so it occasionally makes mistakes when summarizing and answering questions, including when summarizing meetings. The Wall Street Journal cited the case of an early adopter who used Copilot for team meetings, where Copilot fabricated attendees and suggested the calls were about subjects that were not actually discussed.
As for GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it may generate unsafe coding patterns, bugs, references to outdated APIs, or idioms that reflect incomplete code in the training data. The code that Copilot suggests may not necessarily compile, run, or make sense because it is not actually tested.
Security and privacy concerns also impact Copilot significantly, but perhaps the biggest issue is the unresolved fair use issue.
Like most generative AI models, the ones powering Microsoft's Copilots were trained on public data, some of which is copyrighted or subject to restrictive licenses. Microsoft, along with other companies, argue that fair use principles protect them from copyright infringement claims. But that hasn't stopped data owners from filing class-action lawsuits against the company, GitHub, OpenAI, and others for apparent license violations and intellectual property infringement.
Microsoft offers policies to protect certain customers from legal battles arising from fair use challenges, at least in limited circumstances, but the ethical dilemma of using data without permission to train models remains unresolved and may be untenable for some customers.