At Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft’s annual event where it highlights what it has achieved with different partners, the company made several announcements related to AI. 

First, it announced pricing for its upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot offering. The feature will cost $30 per user per month, on top of normal Microsoft 365 pricing. 

“While some generative AI apps focus on a single capability, like real-time transcription or copywriting, Microsoft 365 Copilot puts thousands of skills at your command. By grounding answers in business data like your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining them with your working context – the meeting you’re in now, the emails you’ve exchanged on a topic, the chats you had last week – Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and more actionable responses to your questions,” Frank X. Shaw, chief communications officer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. 

The company also announced Bing Chat Enterprise, which allows companies to use Bing Chat internally so that their data stays protected. According to Microsoft, in the enterprise version chat data isn’t saved and it’s not used to train models. This new feature has begun rolling out at no extra cost for customers of Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium and Business Standard. It will also be available as a standalone subscription for $5 per user per month. 

New features have also been added to Microsoft Sales Copilot to further empower sales teams to use AI. It now includes AI-generated opportunity summaries, contextualized email drafts, and meeting preparations. 

Microsoft also revealed the addition of process mining capabilities to Power Automate. This will give customers more opportunities to optimize their processes so they are more efficient. “With Process Mining, users can understand what is happening across their business, use AI that generates insights, app and automation suggestions, and use Power Platform to quickly build the solutions they need,” Shaw wrote. 

Since Microsoft Inspire is often about showcasing Microsoft’s partnerships with other companies, the company also made several announcements about its collaborations with partners.

It is partnering with Meta on its open-source large-language model, Llama 2. The model will be optimized to run on Windows and Azure customers will be able to deploy Llama 2 models there. 

It also announced that the healthcare company Epic has integrated Azure OpenAI Service into its electronic health record system. This integration provides benefits like allowing doctors to explore patient data in a conversational way and helping them reply to patient messages more efficiently. 

Microsoft also announced its new AI Cloud Partner Program. “In another milestone, Microsoft Inspire marks the launch of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of our partner program, which empowers every partner to deliver customer value while leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud. Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, we’re providing partners with a comprehensive portfolio of investments for all partner business models, at every stage of maturity,” Shaw wrote.