this week in it I'm going to look at the differences between the two paid versions of co-pilot and whether it's worth paying for the Enterprise grade copilot solution as Microsoft announces Enterprise data grounding is coming to copilot in the office apps so stay tuned to find out which version is best for you welcome to this week in it the show where I talk about everything related to Windows Microsoft 365 and Azure this week in it is the fastest growing Enterprise Tech News Channel on YouTube so if you'd like to be part of the buzz and not miss out on the latest uploads then please subscribe to the channel and hit the Bell notification to make sure that you don't miss out on the latest uploads of course I'm sure that you know already that copilot is Microsoft's AI solution for its productivity Suite Microsoft 365 now there are two paid versions of copilot and copilot is available now to all sizes of businesses it doesn't have those restrictions that it had when it was originally announced back in November now the two paid versions are co-pilot Pro which is $20 per user a month and co-pilot for Microsoft 365 which is an extra $10 so that's $30 per user per month now why am I talking about these two different versions of co-pilot right now because earlier this month Microsoft announced that it was bringing Enterprise data grounding to the co-pilot that you see in office apps so that's if you have co-pilot for Microsoft 365 and this is one of the biggest differences between the two different paid versions so I want to talk a little bit about that and the other differences between copilot Pro and Microsoft 365 so before we go on what is a rounding exactly well you probably know that these AI assistants like co-pilot and Google Gemini are based on what are called large language models now these models are trained on publicly available data that's available on the internet now grounding or data grounding as it's sometimes called is the ability to go beyond that kind of general knowledge that these models have and use additional data to provide you with an answer so if we're talking about Microsoft 365 that would be data that you have stored in your tenant so that it can give you answers that are relevant to your data and to your business now today in co-pilot for Microsoft 365 there is data grounding in what used to be called the co-pilot for Microsoft 365 chat application it's now just the co-pilot application and that's available in teams you add it as an application and you can ask it questions about your environment so in this example here I can ask it for instance what documents do we have in our Microsoft 365 tenant that are related to Pet's editorial strategy so I can ask it that question using natural language and it will go off and find all the relevant documents because it uses the data grounding for our Enterprise data now as it stands in Microsoft 365 today if you purchase co-pilot that data grounding is only available in this teams app it doesn't exist in the co-pilot extensions for applications like word excel OneNote Etc and this month Microsoft announc that that is going to change so starting in April it's going to roll out Enterprise data grounding to co-pilot in the desktop office apps as well and that roll out is going to be happening between April and September now today if you want to ground the results that you get back in the office apps you can add up to three reference files to a query to give it that context you have to kind of give it that context manually so what's all of this got to do with co-pilot Pro so the biggest difference in my mind between co-pilot Pro and co-pilot for Microsoft 365 is that in co-pilot Pro there is no Enterprise data grounding the grounding is just on web data so it doesn't know anything about your internal business the data that you've got in your business it doesn't work in teams so that's obviously another big issue so for instance in teams you might ask it to summarize a chat or to go back and find information in a chat or a meeting you can't do any of that stuff with co-pilot Pro so there are two things there so there's the ENT Enterprise data grounding that you don't get in Pro there's the integration with teams that you don't get and the other big thing that you don't get is Enterprise grade data protection so for instance in co-pilot for Microsoft 365 you can use your existing data protection policies things like uh data loss prevention sensitivity labels all that stuff integrates with co-pilot so the question is do you need to pay the extra $10 per user a month for co-pilot for Microsoft 365 well of course that depends if you want to use generative AI that can produce materials that provide relevant information for your organization then you need that Enterprise data grounding and of course if you want to work with your Enterprise data using natural language then you're also going to need the ability that only provided in the more expensive option but you need to have enough data inside your Microsoft 365 tenant to really make that worthwhile if you're not storing your documents or email if you're not using teams for chat and collaboration then you'd have to ask yourself is there any sense in paying for copilot for Microsoft 365 well quite possibly not of course and then you have to consider do you need that Enterprise grade uh data protection well if you're not already using things like sensitivity labs and data loss prevention then unless you have plans to use that then really it doesn't bring anything extra to the table another thing you have to consider is that you can get some of the features connected to teams that you get as part of co-pilot for Microsoft 365 like the ability to uh query meetings and ask questions about what happens in a meeting and that kind of stuff as part of teams premium which is a completely separate product with a SE licens in cost so you could potentially match co-pilot Pro and teams premium together to get a little bit of something that you get in co-pilot Microsoft 365 but again that really bumps up the cost and teams premium is really about branding and control about all the extra stuff that you get with webinars and the ability to control those things in a much more granular way than it is so much about the ability to uh question meetings and get those Recaps and all of that kind of stuff so it's a real mix hot poch of different things so let's just talk about the pricing so let's go back to co-pilot Pro $20 per user a month well at this stage I think it really depends on is it worth it or not I mean it's quite fairly priced if you compare it to chap GPT plus which is exactly the same price but of course with co-pilot Pro you get integration uh Le with the web apps now is it worth paying an extra $10 for co-pilot for Microsoft 365 well considering the power of the things that it's offering you if you're already willing to pay the $20 a month then is it worth that extra $10 a month I think probably yes but only for people in your organization that really understand the power of it and how to get the most out of it I don't think it's something you should consider necessarily rolling out to everybody at this stage and part of the reason I say that is because you still really need to understand how to prompt or engineer a prompt if you like to really get what you want out of co-pilot and you know that is getting better and better but it still requires some understanding of what it can do and how you need to prompt it to get the answers that you need now another little thing about co-pilot Pro is that while it's integrated into the free office apps for the web you will need a Microsoft family or personal subscription if you want that integration with the desktop apps and if you have a business level Microsoft 365 subscription then Microsoft is really only offering you co-pilot for Microsoft 365 you don't get to choose oh well I'd like to have co-pilot Pro and have it work with all of those things you could but you I think you need to use it on a on a different subscription essentially because I don't believe it integrates at all with those Microsoft 365 business subscriptions so really in that situation you don't necessarily have a choice anyway let me know what you think about copilot Pro and co-pilot for Microsoft 365 do you think they've got the pricing right for these two products I'd love to know what you think in the comments below I'm going to leave you with a video on the screen now that talks about Microsoft's lat surface devices and how they're designed for AI and some co-pilot uh updates that Microsoft announced last week if you found this video useful I'd really appreciate it if you gave it a thumbs up because that helps to get it seen by more people on YouTube but that's it for me for this week and I'll see you next time