Office AI pre-order is now available! Microsoft has announced pricing: $30 per month, with a minimum order of 300 accounts.

Less than two months left until the end of 2023, and after a year of industry buzz about the monetization of AI, the first heavyweight contender has finally arrived.

On November 1st, after several months of paid testing, Microsoft Office 365 Copilot, which has been highly anticipated by the industry, officially started pre-orders.

Only available to enterprise customers, with a minimum of 300 users

Office 365 Copilot is priced at $30 per user per month, and enterprise customers need to commit to having at least 300 users in order to qualify for purchasing Copilot. They can contact Microsoft's sales team to obtain the qualification.

Copilot can perform tasks such as summarizing documents, writing emails, and data analysis. In the early stages of paid testing, over 600 enterprise customers have tested Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President responsible for providing new features for Microsoft's business applications, told the media that Microsoft has collected enough data from the trials to demonstrate that Copilot can greatly improve work efficiency. The company plans to disclose these results at the annual Ignite conference on November 14th.

Microsoft stated that in addition to measuring the time saved by employees through tasks such as automatically generating text and data analysis, their testing also includes running control groups to verify the results, while also attempting to assess the quality of AI-generated content.

Limited contribution to Microsoft's revenue in the short term, future competition in AI software will intensify

Derrick Wood, an analyst at TD Cowen, told the media that considering the price of Copilot, customers may not adopt it across the entire enterprise directly, but rather prioritize specific job types that require AI the most.

Jared Spataro stated that the $30 monthly pricing was determined after researching customers' AI budgets. Microsoft also carefully weighed the proportion of the $30 monthly subscription fee in overall labor costs and the extent of productivity improvement in order to justify the additional software cost.

According to consulting firm Forrester Research's calculations, even under "very conservative assumptions," assuming the software only saves two hours per month for senior employees, the additional expenditure is justified.

Some market observers have full confidence in Copilot's future, despite the current high entry price. However, Forrester Research predicts that by 2024, 6.9 million knowledge workers in the United States will be using Copilot.Some analysts also pointed out that although Microsoft is currently leading in terms of "user mindshare," this does not translate into market share. Other software companies will closely monitor whether Microsoft can generate actual revenue growth through Copilot.

According to TD Cowen's calculations, Copilot's contribution to Microsoft's revenue growth in the 2025 fiscal year, starting in July next year, may only be 1%, equivalent to about $2-2.5 billion.

The APIs provided by major language model vendors allow many companies to easily integrate AI, posing a potential threat to Microsoft's Copilot. If the ability to automatically generate email or document summaries becomes a common feature offered by various applications, is Copilot still worth a monthly subscription fee of $30?