I've been using Copilot for a few months, primarily in Outlook and Teams for meetings. Does a pretty good job at summarizing meetings and giving me action items. Easily good enough for me to justify the price.
It’s been rather good at the “office” side of things, and not very useful at doing the things we were doing with OpenAI tools. We too have found it rather good at summarising meetings, a very useful feature for any sort of Microsoft Teams meeting and much better than having some unlucky member of the meeting do it. Copilot has really shined for us, however, have been with PowerPoint, presentations in general and all sort of investor targeted material. I work in the energy sector, and we can’t exactly produce presentations and materials like a design heavy organisation might. So there are two consequences of this, one is that any internal presentation now looks good, which is basically a win-win for everyone. The other is how we’ve basically cut our external orders on design projects to a zero, which is a win did us and terrible for an entire business of graphic designers who target organisations like ours.
I’ve personally mostly used Copilot to make funny pictures after it became apparent that it wasn’t anywhere near the level of OpenAI products as far as behind useful in programming and technology goes. Well, unless it’s very Microsoft documentation related, then Copilot does well at pointing you in the right direction. Well, on the frontend side of things, it’s replaced all our payments to icon libraries, as it’s capable of producing all the icons we need very well. OpenAI can do this as well, but at a cost.
As far as the price goes. Copilot comes with our regular Azure and Office365 subscriptions, and similar to Microsoft teams it’ll be the obvious choice because of this. How will you ever justify paying for a competitor when your budgets show that you’re getting copilot for free? Well, you won’t in most organisations. I’m not a fan of this sort of monopoly, but it’s not like it will change unless EU or US regulation stops it.
One example was how our p1v3 ($0.17 listed) was much cheaper than our p1v2 ($0.11 listed) because our 3rd party agreement was set up that way. The most beautiful part about that, and these things in general, that nobody told our development teams this until around 3 months before we changed 3rd party vendor. A switch we also weren’t informed about, so we went from p1v2 to p1v3 and back again over a few months.
Similarly things like Microsoft teams, crazy amounts of SharePoint online document storage, PowerApps, 365 Copilot and so on, necessarily an increase in cost because they are included on the user licenses we pay per user which “bundles” things.
I can’t get much more technical on the actual pricing and licensing because it’s never been my field of expertise, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care about it. But things aren’t always as clear cut as the public price listings. When you drop a lot of money with Microsoft or Amazons AWS you get “features” that aren’t available to you or me.
It’s important to note that it’s not necessarily free just because it looks free on the budget, but budgets in enterprise organisations are a whole story of themselves.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-importan...