AI Secretaries for Professionals or Job Killers? Why the $30/month AI Office Plan Exceeds Expectations

Microsoft has launched Bing Chat Enterprise, a secure AI chatbot currently in a free preview, set to cost $5 per user per month in the near future. In addition, Microsoft and Meta have introduced the commercial version of the open-source AI model Llama, offering viable alternatives to OpenAI and Google models for startups and businesses.

The AI-powered Office suite is priced at $30 per month, exceeding initial expectations. Microsoft 365 Standard and Premium Business plans are currently priced at $12.50 and $22 monthly, while E3 and E5 plans cost $36 and $57, respectively. The introduction of Copilot will lead to significant cost increases: E3 users face an 83% hike, while Standard Business users will see nearly double their fees. Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler noted that the pricing for 365 Copilot surpassed his forecasts, representing a staggering increase of 53% to 240%. Citigroup analyst Tyler Radke echoed this sentiment, indicating that the pricing far exceeds his earlier estimate of $5 to $20 monthly. Although a complete launch may take some time, analysts view this development positively.

Is AI set to eliminate jobs for white-collar workers? Microsoft asserts that Microsoft 365 Copilot enhances creativity in Word, analyzes data in Excel, designs presentations in PowerPoint, optimizes Outlook inbox management, and summarizes meetings in Microsoft Teams. Many tasks, including document creation, PowerPoint development, Excel management, and email drafting, can now be efficiently completed by this tool. For example, a visually striking PowerPoint presentation that would take hours for a human to create can now be accomplished in minutes. Data analysis tasks that typically require one to two days can be reduced to mere minutes, producing clear and concise visualizations.

While many tasks may become easier, the potential for job loss is significant. At just $30 a month, this AI solution can effectively handle the roles of creative directors, data analysts, administrators, marketers, and others, prompting businesses to reevaluate their staffing needs.

Another highlight from the conference is Bing Chat Enterprise, an enhanced AI chatbot focused on security tailored for business users. This tool assists users in planning business trips by finding suitable flights and hotels based on their budgets and travel history while providing weather information. Importantly, it maintains the confidentiality of all user data, even when sensitive product details are entered.

Bing Chat Enterprise can efficiently compile competitor information and create graphs for product analysis. Microsoft emphasizes that user data is confidential and not used for training purposes. The chatbot also integrates information from various document types such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, enabling it to generate concise overviews or slogans quickly.

In an unexpected collaboration, Meta has partnered with Microsoft to offer the open-source Llama 2 AI model to developers on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform at no cost. This partnership poses a significant challenge to the current landscape dominated by ChatGPT. Llama 1 has already shown competitiveness with ChatGPT and Google Bard, while Llama 2 offers 40% more training data, double the context length, and over a million manually annotated examples to enhance output quality. Evaluation shows that Llama 2 outperforms other open-source language models in reasoning, coding, and knowledge assessments.

When asked about its support for Llama, a Microsoft spokesperson remarked that allowing developers to choose their models reinforces Azure's position as the preferred AI cloud platform. Despite the hailed collaboration with OpenAI, internal documents depict a more complex relationship. Clients often find the details of Microsoft’s GPT services confusing, with instructions for sales teams emphasizing Azure’s enterprise capabilities compared to OpenAI's more limited features. Microsoft maintains only 49% ownership of OpenAI to mitigate antitrust concerns, meaning the technology lacks direct oversight.

With Meta now involved, the complexities in the Microsoft-OpenAI relationship become even more apparent, suggesting that their partnership is not as straightforward as it seems.