Bringing GPT-powered AI to all US subscribers: Why do we need to pay for Copilot Pro? Jared Spataro, Microsoft AI at work, tells The Verge

The senior director of marketing for Copilot Pro says in an interview that people are willing to pay for the integrations. “Copilot Pro is an opportunity to learn from our power users and early adopters. Our plan all along has been how do we bring this value to as many subscribers as possible in a way that works for them and for us.”

“It’s free and secure AI chat that’s GPT-powered,” explains Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer of AI at work, in an interview with The Verge. Even at this level, we think that uploading files is very comparable to the competition. The competition seems to be between Amazon and Microsoft, but Spataro won’t name it.

“The first question people ask me is ‘am I writing you a blank check?’” says Spataro, but Microsoft has built controls for how people pay for AI agent access. “The way you can control the spinning of the meters is paying in different ways. One way to do this is through open accounts, which are basically an open tab, but the other way is through consumption packs, which you can get when the pack runs out.

The consumption rates are a bit complicated. Classic answers that won’t fit in large language models are priced as one message, whereas generative answers cost two messages and anything accessing the Microsoft Graph will cost 30 messages.

Spataro says that a message can be converted to 1 cent, 2 cents, and 30 cents. A customer’sMACC is burned down by an azure meter when it spins.

It feels like Microsoft wants to bring Office features with Artificial Intelligence to more people, but it isn’t true.

The price of Microsoft365 Personal and Home subscriptions will be increased by $3 per month in the US, to bring Office features to all subscribers. For the first time in 12 years, the prices of Microsoft 365 Personal and Family will be raised. “We’ve never actually raised the price in the US and we’re raising it by $3 a month, along with similar amounts in other markets.”

Personal Classic and Family Classic are new plans that are only going to be available for a year. As people are going through the renewal cycle, they will be available. They will be able to choose from the Family Classic or Personal Classic plans if they decide to cancel.

These plans will only be available to existing Microsoft 365 subscribers, and new subscribers will get AI-powered Office features by default with the new pricing changes. It sounds like the classic plans will not receive any of Microsoft’s new features. “They’ll continue to get security updates and minor feature updates, but any new additional innovations that we deliver in the future won’t be included in those plans,” says Oystryk.

If you don’t want the assistant or your school has policies against it, Microsoft will let you turn off Copilot in Office apps. “The most interesting piece of feedback we learned is that there are times where our users want to turn off Copilot,” says Oystryk. Word and PowerPoint are some of the key applications where we are working on new settings that will allow people to off Copilot.