In late October, Microsoft announced the beginning of its Copilot AI assistant’s integration testing phase into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions — consumer-oriented versions of Office apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote — across regions such as Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.
This introduction of Copilot coincided with subscription price hikes in these areas.
As reported by Ed Bott of ZDNet at the time, Microsoft frequently utilizes this regional strategy to gather feedback before broadly launching new pricing and product approaches worldwide.
The company’s initial testing of Copilot AI as a default integration within consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions indicated that its prior method of offering these AI capabilities through an optional $20/month Copilot Pro service was not meeting expectations, as reported by Tom Warren of The Verge.
With the integration, Copilot can perform tasks such as generating drafts, outlines, rewrites, and summaries in Microsoft Word; analyzing data in Microsoft Excel; and creating visuals and speaker notes in Microsoft PowerPoint, among many other features.
However, based on initial feedback from some users who have experienced the Copilot integration within Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions, Microsoft may need to reevaluate its approach.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal last week, a user in Australia switched from Microsoft Word to Google Docs due to the Copilot integration. “Copilot was very keen to be used, and this was irritating to me as a user,” Alistair Fleming told the newspaper.
The WSJ story also mentioned other users who compared Copilot’s introduction to Microsoft’s rollout of “Clippy” in the 1990s, likening the new AI tool to the old Office assistant, which was often more of a hindrance than a help.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a similar comparison between Clippy and Microsoft 365 Copilot for business users in interviews with GeekWire and other publications.
Despite some criticisms, Microsoft is experiencing significant success with its Copilot AI rollouts across cloud services, development platforms, and other areas, stemming from its OpenAI partnership and its own AI initiatives. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood mentioned on a recent earnings call that its overall AI revenue is on track to exceed $10 billion annually.
On a related note, Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna, an executive leading its Copilot initiatives for businesses, disputed Benioff’s claim that Microsoft employees are not using Copilot themselves.
“I love his passion. But it’s just not true,” Lamanna wrote, linking to a series of case studies provided by Microsoft showcasing Copilot’s usage within the company. “I use Copilot. My team uses Copilot. And pretty much all of Microsoft has been actively using Copilot for two years. That’s 100s of thousands of us!”
Microsoft’s communications chief Frank X. Shaw fact-checked Benioff’s assertions.
Beyond competitive exchanges with Salesforce, the unfolding situation highlights the challenges Microsoft faces in introducing new technologies into existing products at its scale. While Microsoft 365’s vast user base is one of its greatest assets as AI is introduced to businesses and consumers, alienating those users also presents a significant risk.
