Learning about Copilot accounts and subscriptions - Microsoft Copilot Tutorial

- Some Copilot tools are free and some require a subscription that you pay for. So I'd like to clarify those subscription options as they relate to the two most popular Copilot products. One of those products is the Copilot chat assistant. It has a chat field where you can ask questions or make requests. Copilot can answer questions, draft text, or generate pictures, and many versions of this chat assistant can be used for free. The other option is to use Copilot inside of office applications like Excel, Outlook, Teams and Microsoft Word, and that option requires a paid subscription. Those are the two main products, and I'll start in the chat assistant because that can help us start to understand the subscription options. Copilot.microsoft.com is just one of the places you can use the chat assistant to ask questions or have conversations. There's a sign in button up at the top. Now, you can use the chat assistant for free without signing in, but it will limit the number of questions you can ask per day and may provide slower responses. I'll click the sign in button and you can see that there are two categories of users. Someone with a personal account or someone with a work or school account. And we can think of these as individual users or business users. For personal or individual users, You can choose that sign in option. And if you have an Outlook account, an Xbox account or a free account that you use to sign into Windows, then you can use that here. Or if you don't already have an account, you'll see there's an option to create a new free account. For now I'll click the back button to take a step back and I'll click that sign in button again. Now, the option for a work or school account is for people who are already part of an organization with a Microsoft 365 subscription. Usually your school or employer sets up a Microsoft 365 subscription for your organization and assigns an account to you. Of course, your organization pays for the Microsoft 365 subscription, but after that, if you sign into Copilot with that account, you can use Copilot for free. So if you sign in with a work or a school account that is sometimes called Copilot with Entra ID. Or for individual users, that free Microsoft account is abbreviated as MSA. So we call that Copilot with MSA. Signing in with one of these free accounts lets you have longer more meaningful conversations with Copilot's chat assistant, and it can keep track of your conversation history. But the business account Copilot with Entra ID also includes commercial data protection, which secures your prompts and interactions using the security features in Microsoft 365. So that's the basic chat assistant. Beyond that, there is a subscription that you can buy that will enable those Copilot tools inside of Office applications, and that subscription also enables a more robust version of the chat assistant. First, for business users, your organization can buy licenses for Copilot for Microsoft 365. This is an Add-on that is added to an existing Microsoft 365 subscription. On the other side, if you are an individual with a personal or family account, there is a paid add-on called Copilot Pro. Both of these subscriptions allow you to use Copilot inside of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. But the business subscription adds Microsoft Teams to that list. We'll get a quick look at how those tools work as we go through this workshop. Both of these subscriptions also enable features in the chat assistant, including faster responses and access to newer language models. But there's one more feature that is only available in the subscription for business users, and that is the ability to find information about your organization in the chat assistant. To see that, I'll go back to copilot.microsoft.com. I'll click the sign in button and choose the option for a work or school account, and I'll sign in with an account that has the Copilot from Microsoft 365 add-on. When you sign in with this add-on, you will see that the Copilot interface changes just a little bit. Now the Copilot assistant can answer questions and requests related to secure data in my organization. I'll ask a question about one of my coworkers. I'll ask, when was my last meeting with Stewart Mori, and I'll click the send button. And it gives me the answer based on information from my organization. So you can ask questions about your coworkers, your schedule, your email and chat history, documents that have been shared in your organization and more. And this is protected by the security in Microsoft 365. It will only show me information about my organization if I have security permission to view that information traditionally. So the feature that allows Copilot to use information in your organization is only available in the business subscription. Individual personal users are not part of an organization, so that feature is not available for them. Now to finish, there's one point of confusion that I often see, and that is the naming of these paid upgrades. Some people assume that the name Pro refers to business users, but you can see that is not the case. Copilot Pro is the option for individuals or consumers. Copilot from Microsoft 365 is for business users. So if the Copilot Chat assistant is all you need, then you can just sign in with your Microsoft account and use that for free. But if you want to access the fastest responses and newest language models, or if you want to use the Copilot tools inside of applications like Word, Excel, and Outlook, then you should consider one of the paid add-ons. As we go through the rest of this workshop, we can see how to use the Copilot tools that are enabled when you sign in with each of these different types of accounts.