Cost of CoPilot
It’s the weekend. But I needed to sit and read after raking up far too many leaves from the garden today. So, many, leaves.
This is an interesting article as the subject has come up a couple of times in conversation recently.
Richard Speed
GenAI is very expensive to set-up and run. Prohibitively expensive for lots of businesses. Microsoft has invested heavily in this, it has the hype, it needs the traction.
But it seems only E3 or E5 customers can get copilot (not Business Standard or Premium), with a minimum of 300 seats and no volume discount, and the commitment is to the end of your EA contract. In essence it could double the cost of those seats per month until you renew.
As Technology Leaders we’re business enablers but we should also be very mindful of cost against benefit (and the damn budget). I’d want a really good business case to lock in that cost for the contract period. Because we all know how fun MS Licensing is. If you need to cut budget by x% in the coming years, you’re not getting out of that so it would have to come from elsewhere.
My gut is agreeing with some of the discussion - has the bar for entry been set too high and SMEs may get better benefit but they’re shut out right now? Possibly.
Having been involved in some Enterprise product releases in the past, I know the standard of releasing to the ‘Big Guns’ first. But sometimes volume helps with adoption. Hoping Microsoft will adjust sooner rather than later.
Mary J Foley has further details here
Mary Jo Foley