Microsoft announced today that Copilot AI features are now included in Microsoft 365 plans, across both single-user (‘Personal’) and family plans. That includes summarizing, writing, and outlining features in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote, as well as asking questions about the current document in the Copilot sidebar. These features startedshowing up in 2023, and more have been added over time, but they required the separate Copilot Pro subscription or a compatible organization-managed account.
Before now, you could avoid the AI features in the Microsoft 365 apps by simply not signing up for Copilot Pro, or by using the one-time purchase version of Office. Now that it’s bundled, Microsoft is adding a new setting toturn off Copilot featureswhen needed. The company is also saying again that your prompts, responses, and file contents arenot used to train AI models.
It sure seems like this is Microsoft making everyone pay more for AI features that many people don’t care about. Copilot Pro worked well enough as an add-on for the people who needed that functionality, but it’s probably more profitable for Microsoft to bundle it with the more popular base subscriptions while increasing prices. That’s a strategy we’ve seen over and over again with Amazon Prime, which now includeseverything from free shipping to discounts on fuel at gas stations, so every price increase can be answered with “but you get so many benefits!”. If you never end up using the AI features, then that’s even better, because Microsoft gets more profit from your subscription. Google is alsopulling the same movewith Workspace and its Gemini AI features, but that’s limited to organization-owned accounts for now.
To play devil’s advocate, this is the first time Microsoft has increased prices since the home version of Office 365 wasreleased in 2013. The original $100/year price for the personal plan adjusted for inflation would be around $134/yr, so the plans are still under the cost of inflation. You can also stillbuy the Office apps without a subscription or cloud storage, orget the Microsoft 365 Basic planwith 100GB cloud storage and no Office apps.
No one likes price increases, and using AI features with questionable utility as the main selling point probably isn’t helping. Still, there are other plan options you can check out, or just switch to free office suites likeLibreOfficeandApple’s iWork.
