Copilot in Bing is the new name that the firm has given to the AI-powered chatbot that it debuted on Bing earlier this year called Bing Chat. The announcement was made today at Microsoft Ignite 2023. Copilot is the new name for the premium, business-oriented variant of Bing Chat, formerly known as Bing Chat Enterprise. Previously, this variant was known as Bing Chat Enterprise.
Why are you changing your name? Even though Microsoft now sells more than a dozen products under the Copilot brand name, the company insists that the title won’t lead to misunderstandings.
“Renaming ‘Bing Chat Enterprise’ to ‘Copilot’ reflects our vision to create a unified Copilot experience for consumer and commercial customers,” Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, told TechCrunch via email. “Copilot” is the new name for the service formerly known as “Bing Chat Enterprise.”
It makes perfect sense. But it’s also possible that Bing Chat didn’t make much of a difference for Bing, in which case Microsoft may be aiming to separate the technology from the search engine responsible for its creation—six months after Bing Chat’s debut, StatCounter’s research published in August revealed that Bing had not taken any market share away from Google. Microsoft has contested the conclusions of the analysis.
It is not only the name that has been changed. Beginning on December 1, customers who log in to Bing using a corporate account—specifically, 1Microsoft Entra ID—will have the advantage of “commercial data protection” while using Copilot in Bing. This is a new feature that was recently added to Bing. According to Roulston, this implies that their data will not be kept and will not be used to train AI models. Furthermore, Microsoft will not have access to it.
“On December 1st, Copilot will update the commercial terms and conditions to reflect that officially available product from Microsoft,” she continued. “This information will be made available to you.” “As a result, it will take on the universal licensing conditions that Microsoft has established for online services. Over time, Microsoft will allow even more Entra ID users to take advantage of the Copilot service with commercial data protection at no additional cost.
Copilot is now available in Windows in addition to Copilot.Microsoft.com and Bing, and it is included at no additional cost in a variety of corporate subscription plans offered by Microsoft, including Microsoft 365 E, E5, Business Premium, and Business Standard. Beginning on December 1st, Copilot will be a part of the Microsoft 365 F3 offering. It will be made a la carte on December 1 for all other clients for $5 monthly.
