CoPilot now at 15% off for non profits
11th November 2024
Microsoft have announced from the start of this month that CoPilot will be 15% cheaper for eligible non profits. Up to now, there has been a reluctance at Microsoft to discount their Microsoft 365 AI integration product, but starting from this month the license cost will drop to $25.50 per user per month. There is still the requirement to sign up for the full year and pay in one lump sum at the start of the term.
For information on what CoPilot is check out our post here – Copilot Lifts Off – Solutions Squared
A question we get asked is why should an organisation bother investing in CoPilot when ChatGPT can be accessed on a limited basis for free. The answer is risk. When your user base goes and finds their own solutions because the organisation is not providing the tools they need, they look to convenient internet based systems to perform these tasks. This so called “shadow IT” represents a risk. You have no control over where your data is going or who has it. ChatGPT uses the information it is given to train its algorithm to make the system more responsive. If organisation data is put into ChatGPT this will be used and retained.
CoPilot is different. It does not use your information to become smarter. It respects permissions that you already have put in place. If something is in your personal OneDrive when CoPilot responds to a prompt it will not return results from your OneDrive unless you are asking the question, or you have shared that information out.
Another question is how useful is CoPilot really? The system is improving all the time. Microsoft have released CoPilot Wave 2 to add additional features. The Excel add in is officially out of beta and data no longer needs to be converted to tables in order to interrogate it. We recently used CoPilot to sum up the monthly time spent on tickets saving a good few hours manipulating the data to achieve the same aim. A simple prompt of “Total hours actual for each month” on each Worksheet gave us a table of results for each month and a graph.
A number of organisations we support are investigating how CoPilot can help with productivity, allowing users to do more and remove mundane tasks. To see how CoPilot can help your organisation get in touch with us today.