Notes on Inspire

Over the last few days Microsoft employees and partners have gathered for the annual Inspire event. This is where Microsoft announces big updates for the financial year to come. We’ve summarized the most crucial items for you below.

Microsoft announced Bing Chat Enterprise

Artifical Intelligence (AI) First of all, Microsoft announced Bing Chat Enterprise. This is a new AI powered chat for work with commercial data protection. Any search data from a user remains inside the organization without leaks. Microsoft states it has no access to an individual user’s search history. For now, Bing Chat Enterprise is available in preview and can be added at no additional cost to M365 E3 and E5.

As a standalone product it will start at $5 per user per month. In our opinion it seems a great new addition to the M365 family and can help many organizations leverage the benefits of AI. Although people will need to start using the Bing search engine more.

Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing!

We recently already wrote about Copilot, but in case you are not aware, the licensing rules are as follows:

  • If you subscribe to M365 E3, E5, Business Standard or Business Premium you can buy this as an add-on at general availability.
  • Copilot is then integrated into your office applications, but also applies its logic to, for instance, your calendar, meetings and contacts.

New information is regarding the pricing. Microsoft has set the price for Copilot at a staggering $30 per user per month on top of your M365 price! We doubt this has been received with much applause, as this could double your M365 spend.

This is an initial price point, so it can end up being lower depending on your contract model and pricelist. However, we think this is stil very expensive.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft generates a business case around this and how they will structure their Enterprise Agreement negotiations. We can see this going the direction of PowerApps, where Microsoft quickly realized they were not offering a competitive price and reduced it drastically. Time will tell…

Microsoft License Desk

Other items of interest:

  • Microsoft also announced more functionality for Microsoft Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales. Designed to produce opportunity summaries, create email drafts and meeting preparations.
  • Next on the list is Power Automate Process Mining. It appeared already in last month’s product terms update. Now Microsoft revealed more information on this topic. Power Automate Process Mining enables you to leverage AI to optimize existing processes and drive efficiency through low-code automation.
  • One topic clearly anticipated by many organizations is the expansion of Azure OpenAI Services. The latest announcement states it will be available to more Microsoft customers, expanding it into Asia, while making it easier to use the services in North America and Western Europe.
  • In other Azure news, Microsoft signed a partnership with Meta for the Llama language models. They will be made available on the Azure platform or native on Windows (for developers). Key here is that they are to run on the secure Azure fabric, which opens them up to many large organizations.
  • For all Microsoft partners, Microsoft has now launched the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner program. A new program that leverages Microsoft AI and Microsoft Cloud. If you are already working in this space, you are automatically flagged and included in this program

Keep an eye on our blog and LinkedIn for more updates like this!

More information

We hope you found our Inspire notes interesting. If we stumble upon more news or updates, we will make sure to update this post or a new post if it’s a substantial / extensive topic.

Reach out to us with any comments or questions. You can visit our website for more information and updates, or contact our licensing experts at info@licenseq.com.

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