Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant integrated into Microsoft 365 and Windows that helps with writing, analysis, summarization, task automation, and creative ideas—bringing smart support directly into your workflow and everyday apps.

Pricing Model: Free, Paid

Category: Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

https://copilot.microsoft.com/

Release Date: 16/03/2023

• Contextual integration with Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams)
• Natural language prompts: write, summarize, transform, generate content
• Data analysis and insights: interpret tables, charts, pivot data
• Copilot Chat: conversational assistant embedded in Microsoft 365
• Copilot Studio: build custom AI agents and workflows
• Copilot Vision (multimodal): understand images, screenshots, and visual content
• Task automation: generate drafts, build outlines, refine documents
• Real-time suggestions and suggestions based on your context / work data
• Enterprise security, compliance, privacy and governance built into Copilot
• Agent mode, memory, and extensibility: persistent context, multi-step chains, and custom plugins

Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant designed to be deeply embedded into Microsoft 365 and your computing environment, bridging creativity, productivity, and automation in a seamless way. It works as your co-pilot: a conversational, context-aware companion that helps you write, analyze, create, summarize, and get insights using natural language prompts. Rather than toggling between multiple tools, Copilot lets you stay in your familiar apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams—and enhance them with generative intelligence and understanding of your data and context.

In practice, you might ask Copilot to draft an email, generate a presentation outline, summarize meeting notes, or build an Excel model from natural language description. Copilot draws on your work content (documents, chats, calendar, files) via Microsoft Graph and securely links into your personal context so that suggestions are personalized and relevant. It can also handle visual input through Copilot Vision, enabling you to show an image or screenshot and ask questions about what’s in view.

For organizations and power users, Copilot Studio allows creation of custom agents and workflows. You can define agents that respond to particular data sources or integrate with business systems. Copilot Studio’s pricing is usage-based, with message/agent capacity packs. The architecture supports memory, chaining of steps, and extensibility so agents can carry context over multi-turn interactions.

Microsoft adopted a tiered pricing model: a baseline “Copilot Chat” experience is offered at no additional charge in eligible Microsoft 365 plans. The fuller Microsoft 365 Copilot offering is a paid add-on (around USD 30 per user per month) enabling full integration into apps and advanced features. For individual users, Copilot Pro provides AI enhancements across personal devices at about USD 20/month.

Copilot also emphasizes enterprise controls: security, compliance, privacy, governance frameworks are built in so organizations can adopt confidently. Frequent updates deliver new capabilities and refine its reasoning, memory, and overall performance. With its tightly integrated nature and broad feature set, Microsoft Copilot is suited for knowledge workers, business teams, educators, and any user who wants to work smarter by letting AI assist directly in their daily workflows.

Alternative to Microsoft Copilot