Microsoft has already attracted a number of major companies to utilize Copilot as they start selling the AI expansion to Office productivity software subscriptions for $30 per person per month. Analysts at Piper Sandler believe the tool could generate more than $10 billion in yearly income by 2026. This doesn't include taking up any other programmes, like Microsoft's Purview to control data.Microsoft is positioned for its next cycle of growth with the launch of its Microsoft 365 Copilot artificial intelligence add-on for Office app subscriptions targeted at companies. The feature appears in Word, Excel and other Office programs, and is priced at $30 per person per month, resulting in potential annualized revenue of more than $10 billion by 2026, as analysts at Piper Sandler have projected.As Microsoft seeks to maximize its lead in the productivity software market, where Google is attempting to gain ground with its Duet AI enhancement for its Workspace subscriptions, Piper Sandler assumes that 18% of users will use Copilot. Though this may be an aggressive forecast, analysts have indicated that the fear of missing out will likely drive uptake.As of the Fortune 100 list of U.S. companies based on revenue, 40% were utilizing Copilot as part of an invite-only paid early-access program announced in May. CEO Satya Nadella has noted that once users employ Copilot, they cannot imagine working without it.However, Gartner's Jason Wong has warned that as the preview was only announced six months ago, there is limited data on how Copilot has impacted performance. To get access, companies must purchase at least 300 licenses for employees, and Microsoft must ensure widespread distribution.Gartner advocates organizations experimenting with generative AI, technology that can produce synthetic images and text with a few words of human input. Wong believes that a 20% penetration rate can be expected within the next two to three years due to early adopters.Microsoft has proposed the most highly-paid executives make use of Copilot to prioritize emails and grasp documents quickly. But Gartner has opined that it might be wiser to first provide the tool to tech-savvy staff acquainted with potential issues like inaccurate responses generated by the technology. As Microsoft indicates on its website, the output of generative AI is not guaranteed to be accurate.Beyond the Copilot fees, deploying the tool may prompt organizations to use additional Azure cloud services such as Purview for data management. Ultimately, Microsoft is expected to benefit from the ability of ChatGPT, a chatbot from OpenAI, whose language models are a key component of Copilot and have been incorporated into the technology products of other big-name software firms. Microsoft's Copilot is compliant with the company's standards for privacy, with prompts and responses not used for training language models.
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