Microsoft has begun expanding the reach of its Copilot feature set, bringing its AI capabilities to Office apps for anyone currently subscribed to Microsoft 365 Personal or Family.
For customers in the US and Europe, those features are only available with an extremely pricey Copilot Pro subscription. For Personal and Family subscribers, the upgrade costs an extra $20 monthly, which is more than double the cost of the basic Microsoft 365 subscription.
But that’s all about to change.
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In the Southern Hemisphere, the company is making Copilot part of all Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions. According to an announcement I found last November, the change is effective for Microsoft 365 subscribers in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand; they also get access to the Microsoft Designer app for generating images.
Over the past two months, current subscribers in those regions have been reporting that they got access to Copilot in their apps after they updated to the latest version. But with the start of the new year, Microsoft has started informing those customers that their subscription prices are about to rise substantially.
One unhappy customer signed on to a Microsoft Community board to complain about the sudden and unexpected price hike: “I just got an email saying my family subscription is going from $129 a year to $179 a year. That’s a big increase!”
Yes, it is. And what do those subscribers get for those hefty extra fees? Sorry, but this isn’t an all-you-can-AI deal. As the announcement explains, “Subscribers will receive a monthly allotment of AI credits to use Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Designer. The credits will also apply to apps like Paint, Photos, and Notepad on Windows.” The option of a Copilot Pro subscription is available for subscribers who use more than the basic basket of credits.
While the new features are free to current subscribers, the upgrade comes with two big gotchas. For Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, the added features are available only to the primary user and can’t be shared with other members. And if the primary user doesn’t want those features, they’re nearly impossible to disable.
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On paper, this is a good deal for current subscribers. Or at least that’s what Microsoft is hoping those subscribers will think after they’ve had a chance to give the Copilot features a test drive. The current $20-a-month Copilot Pro subscription is prohibitively expensive. The new package offers a reasonable chunk of AI credits for just over $4 a month. Such a bargain, right?
But my quick survey of online forums suggests that very few customers are buying that math. And for those who neither want nor need those AI features, finding the alternative is a challenge. A Microsoft 365 Classic option is available, without the Copilot features, at prices that are similar to those in place before the AI-driven increase. But the only way to unlock that option is to try to cancel your current subscription. At that point, as Office-Watch discovered, Microsoft coughs up the lower-priced alternative.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world — including the US and Western Europe — the free Copilot features aren’t available — yet. But I expect it’s only a matter of time before this change expands to additional markets.
It’s not unusual for Microsoft to try out new subscription offers on a regional basis before taking them to a worldwide market. That’s exactly what this announcement looks like.
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Anyone who’s paid attention to Satya Nadella’s Microsoft in recent years knows that the company is all in on AI, so it would be odd if there were no plans to roll out a similar feature set to the Microsoft 365 subscription base worldwide. Starting in the APAC region gives the company time to gauge customer reaction and also continue scaling up the capacity of servers that power Copilot features.
Based on the pricing in those test regions, pricing for customers in the US would probably increase by $50 — from $69 to $119 for Personal plans and from $99 to $149 for Family subscriptions. Those data centers aren’t going to pay for themselves.
The expanded offering is still brand new, but Reddit users from the region have already weighed in with complaints. One asked, rhetorically, “I’m just meant to put up with unwanted bundleware that I never agreed to soaking up CPU cycles on my hardware … because Microsoft needs to look like [its] AI spend is getting ROI to investors?”
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Another Reddit user, who’s apparently a graduate student in Taiwan, called the new Copilot features a “nightmare,” adding that it can’t be turned off. “Doesn’t Microsoft understand that Graduate/Phd students receive an automatic fail or are charged with academic misconduct for any hint of AI assistance in their writing?”
In my testing of the Copilot Pro features in a Microsoft 365 in the Northern Hemisphere, I discovered that the option to turn off those prompts, which had been available in earlier releases, is no longer available. You can hide the AI panes above and to the right of the document, but the Copilot icon in the document itself is ever-present and can’t be squelched.
Last November, I asked Microsoft if the company has plans to introduce similar features in the US and other worldwide remarks. A spokesperson replied, “The company has rolled out changes in six markets to listen, learn, and improve. We don’t have anything more to share today.”
I hope they’re listening.