Microsoft has removed the enterprise restriction on availability of its AI tool Copilot, which will now be accessible to Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard Customers.

The 300-seat purchase minimum for commercial plans has been removed making Copilot available for Office 365 E3 and E5 customers (A Microsoft 365 license was previously required).

Small and Medium Business users can purchase between one and 299 seats at a rate of $US30 per person per month.

Commercial customers can now procure Copilot for Microsoft 365 through Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider partners.

"As we kick off a new year, we’re thrilled to see people increasingly using and loving Microsoft Copilot for work and life," noted Yusuf Mehdi, Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, Microsoft. "Our goal is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more by bringing Copilot, the everyday AI companion, to millions of people around the world."

Copilot is a generative AI tool integrated into Microsoft's suite of apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Its goal is to act like a highly intelligent assistant to help users boost productivity when working with these apps.

Microsoft promises it will provide single AI experience that runs across your devices, understanding your context on the web, on your PC, across your apps and soon on your phone to bring the right skills to you when you need them.

The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like an assistant, appearing in a sidebar as a chatbot. It will also be available to summon inline, allowing users to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel.

Copilot is also available in Teams, able to summarise a meeting. Email threads in Outlook can also be summarised, and Copilot can create draft email responses with a variety of tones or lengths.

Individuals will need to pay $US20 a month for a Copilot Pro subscription.

Microsoft has also flagged the upcoming release of a feature called Copilot GPT – a customized Copilot tailored for a specific topic – which will be accessible in a new Copilot GPT Builder with just a simple set of prompts.