As the digital landscape continues to evolve, two game-changing tools have emerged as major players in the world of AI-enhanced productivity at work - Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise. These advanced platforms are designed to empower businesses and improve efficiency through intelligent, AI-powered features.
In the fast-paced business environment, organizations need to be mindful of the tools they invest in. Carefully evaluating costs and benefits ensures the highest return on investment (ROI). Therefore, this article delves into an in-depth analysis of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise, focusing on their costs, capabilities, and the potential ROI they offer.
In this blog, we will:
· Delve into Bing Chat for Enterprise
· Explore Microsoft 365 Copilot
· Look at the ROI of Microsoft Copilot
· Compare Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise
· Review How to Embrace the Future of these Technologies
Now, let's dive in!
Bing Chat Enterprise stands out for its cost-efficiency. For organizations already subscribed to Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium, Bing Chat Enterprise is an added benefit, making it a more appealing proposition as it is included at no additional cost. For those who don't have that licensing, there is a pathway to enabling it as a stand-alone offering for $5 per user per month.
Take a look at the video below from Microsoft!
With Microsoft 365 E5, E3, or Business Standard/Premium Bing Chat Enterprise becomes an invaluable tool, handling many data privacy compliance and governance scenarios, easing the burden on organizations. It uses commercial data protection that ensures chat is not saved. Your data isn't used to train models and much more.
There are three main ways to engage and interact with Bing Chat Enterprise.
Bing.com/Chat: You can use Bing.com/Chat in a browser which gives you the ability to summarize, compare, make decisions with more information, and even complete tasks(organizing tabs, getting passwords from another browser, streaming a movie, etc).
Microsoft Edge Sidebar: The Microsoft Edge Bing chat sidebar supports the same search and creative capabilities of Bing.com/Chat but can also perform searches and answers concerning the page you are viewing. So if you ask, "What are the key takeaways from this article?" it can summarize them.
Windows Copilot Sidebar: This sidebar opens on your desktop and stays consistent as it runs across your apps, programs, and windows. You can do the same things you do with Bing Chat and take actions on your PC via Windows commands and any plugins you have set up and enabled.
Despite its rich feature set, the success of Bing Chat Enterprise lies in its adoption. We encourage organizations to introduce this tool to their users and fully leverage its potential as it doesn't just add value in enabling safer and more responsible access to AI for common internet scenarios. Still, it also unifies the search experience bringing enterprise context into search results as appropriate (such as suggesting people, resources, or more from your organization).
There is significant value in using ChatGPT-like tools like Bing Chat. We already know that early research shows a substantial 40% productivity improvement and an 18%+ quality boost from users who use it in work scenarios.
Looking for a visual breakdown? Watch the video below.
Sometimes the biggest challenge is helping employees understand how they can use it. Here area few quick examples to help get started:
Seek advice for decision-making: "What are the benefits and drawbacks of digital advertising?" and "How can I evaluate the effectiveness of my digital marketing efforts?"
Acquire new abilities: "What are the key elements I need to understand while overseeing a remote team?" and "Can you explain lean project management and how it differs from traditional methods?"
Evaluate data: "With an anticipated 9% revenue growth for the next quarter, how does our internal forecast align with revenue growth in the top European tech companies?"
Summarize documents accessed in Edge: "Can you outline the key points from this company-wide financial audit report and the main areas of concern?" and "What are the recommended strategies to resolve these financial issues?"
Improve coding skills: "Can you help me write Python code for a Fibonacci series?" or "How can I employ the PyTest framework to create test cases for my Python program?"
Arrange corporate travel: "Recommend some hotels in downtown Chicago with a gym facility nearby."
Create content for social platforms: "Using this communication guide, create 5 posts emphasizing its benefits to first responders."
Building on the framework provided by Azure and Microsoft, organizations can customize their AI experiences and develop their own AI experience that can complement Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Copilot. The services in Azure, as an example, can help an organization get started quicker by using large, pre-trained AI models to unlock new scenarios, build custom AI models fine-tuned with your data and hyperparameters, leverage built-in features that ensure you are using AI responsibly and provide enterprise-grade security and role-based access control and private networks.
This means where Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Copilot can't meet your needs; you can still use the same plugin, security, and integration to extend or create your own solutions.
Microsoft 365 Copilot introduces a new pricing model, costing $30 per user per month in the US. With this price tag, it's crucial to delve into its capabilities to understand if it offers value for money.
Keep in mind that Copilot in Microsoft Viva is included (at no additional cost), and it is also included within Power Platform (at no additional cost), so this is only about using it with your core office experiences such as SharePoint, Teams, Office and more at the above price point.
Despite the additional cost, Microsoft 365 Copilot offers superior functionality over the baseline capabilities of the LLM or something like Bing Chat Enterprise. But do these additional features justify the price?
Rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to every employee may not yield the best return on investment (ROI) as it takes time to learn and establish how to best use it for individual and group productivity.
A more strategic approach involves targeting specific individuals to optimize productivity and cost efficiency. Focusing on the over-leveraged employees, highly connected, and super collaborators can have the biggest return since many already look to them to complete complex work. For those individuals being more digitally fit, it is critical to help them scale and meet significant internal demand.
Employees who work digitally and require effective digital fitness might be good candidates for Copilot. Still, starting with a smaller group you can actively coach, support, and guide may be best in these early days with a rapidly rolling set of pilots and extended deployment to follow.
With Microsoft 365 Copilot still in its rolling pilot stage, successful organizations treat it as a digital fitness initiative. This forward-thinking strategy involves a conscientious approach to its deployment, carefully measuring tangible impacts. Not every role or individual will need the same level of digital fitness to be successful, so it's important to have a flexible approach when it comes to disrupting how people work and encouraging new ways of working.
Looking to understand Microsoft Copilot before investing? Keep reading or watch our video below!
The productivity boost offered by tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot is significant. We have mature and effective research showing how impactful Copilot has been for developers, and more recently, we are starting to see compelling studies on ChatGPT's impact on employees and workers.
It's essential to keep in mind that Microsoft 365 Copilot has an even more significant impact in our early reports and studies with the organizations piloting it because it has additional contextualized capabilities that help it reason over your organization data and its relationships that LLM tools like ChatGPT in the research didn't have. Even with this early-stage insight, it's clear that the productivity increase is significant.
To put this into context, in this MIT study, baseline capabilities of LLMs like ChatGPT substantially raise average productivity by decreasing the time taken (approx. 40%) and improving output quality (approx. 18%). This meant that ChatGPT mostly substituted worker effort rather than only complementing worker skills and restructured tasks towards idea generation and editing and away from rough drafting. When you consider how work involves an additional effort to provide context to a tool like ChatGPT, there is overhead in 'grounding' the AI, which something like Microsoft 365 Copilot does for you. The study shows these results will be much more notable in an enterprise context with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
.png)
What's more, it's important to understand how collaboration is changing with AI tools.
It's evident in early research that people may need to collaborate less with people for tasks that can now more effectively be done individually (such as being able to aggregate documents or find the right resources by working with Copilot faster than interrupting a peer). This is because AI experiences like Copilot bring skills and rapid reasoning capabilities to individuals that they would need to get from others historically.
Collaboration has many costs, including additional communication, miscommunication, and more. In some estimates, while we know collaboration results in more value (quality of the result), these costs can be 3x the effort costs (due to focus, interrupts, and more), so an increase in 50% productivity when you consider the way collaboration is impacted individually may actually be more representative of a 150%+ gain.
Additionally, thinking about a copilot experience in a group or multi-person collaboration setting is important. In those settings, it's not just that each person is more productive, but the way they use AI and Copilot may differ. This means that in the same way, people benefit from collaborating with others for each individual added to the collaboration, using Copilot, you may see an exponential increase in impact on quality or productivity, compounding the effects of an individual (while also helping uplift digital fitness across the collaborators as they see how each other leveraged AI in their work).
With these kinds of improvements, a price point of $30.00 per user per month may be an amazing deal, especially for highly digital workers.
The path to successful Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment begins with understanding how to use AI tools like Copilot for your individual or personal productivity. Understanding how AI can be used at this level is crucial before extending the deployment to the team or organizational level.
In our work with customers on adoption, digital fitness, and digital excellence with AI, we have seen that starting at a large business unit level or even a team level can be more challenging than initially supporting individual use cases/understanding of AI. This is because collaboration with AI relies on individuals to make judgments on how it can be best used and often the development (or honing) of new skills as well that support it at scale.
For example, start by focusing on how employees can embrace a new way of working where they use AI for their own tasks/work. This gives them time to build AI aptitude — from practicing prompt engineering to fact-checking and verifying AI-generated content. Then you typically scale by leveraging learning resources and crowdsourcing best practices from employees as they adapt to AI. If you don't have champion programs or ways for employees to share their digital excellence, you need to establish a foundation ASAP to succeed with AI.
Each Copilot option enhances the work experience it's based on. For Bing Chat Enterprise, it enhances search and creativity scenarios that we often do in the browser or on the desktop. For Microsoft Copilot for Viva, it makes the EX promise they bring more accessible and accelerates the benefits they provide. For Copilot for Power Platform, it accelerates and makes being a maker building digital solutions easier.
For Microsoft 365 Copilot, it gives an incredible set of skills and capabilities like superpowers that help employees get their work done faster while delivering higher quality results. Each AI capability serves different purposes, with Azure ones being the most adaptable to your organization's needs, but they all share common benefits such as productivity and quality improvements.
The choice between just having something like Bing Chat Enterprise or taking it further with Microsoft 365 Copilot ultimately depends on the specific needs of your organization and individual, but it's clear that having all of these experiences can make a digitally fit individual or organization far more capable than those without it.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise offer unique capabilities to improve productivity and quality. These AI tools hold significant business potential as we navigate an increasingly digital landscape. It's our job as leaders to unlock this potential and make it more accessible and available to our employees.
As we look to the future, the role of AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise will undoubtedly become even more prominent as they continue to improve, such as the most recent improvements with Bing Chat Enterprise, where it can use image input.
By understanding these tools' costs, capabilities, and ROI today, businesses can prepare for amore productive and efficient tomorrow.
