Even within the Microsoft landscape, the choices around Copilot and AI are broad and can be confusing. I spend a chunk of my time talking to CIOs and other leaders deciding the AI strategy for their organisation, and a common conversation is how to frame Copilot for Microsoft 365 against other options. It's the new "what to use when" conversation in Microsoft-land. If the challenge being addressed is 'providing the right set of AI tools to a business', there are multiple options from Microsoft and beyond, and choosing the right approach comes down to properly considering what you're trying to solve for and understanding not just the orientation, but also the capabilities and limitations of the various options.
Common questions I'm hearing include:
- We're not sure about licensing Microsoft 365 Copilot across the entire business, what other options do I have?
- I see ChatGPT has an Enterprise version now - it seems to solve the data privacy risks of the consumer version, and all our employees are familiar with ChatGPT. Should I use that?
- Should we use free Microsoft 365 Copilot chat + agents instead of paid "full" Microsoft 365 Copilot? How much might the PAYG agent costs be?
- I understand Microsoft 365 Copilot, but where does Copilot Studio fit in?
Understanding the characteristics and pricing of the major options becomes vital to make the right decisions. Sometimes it will be an economic decision, sometimes it will be capability led - at Advania, we've seen it all. We're strong advocates of Microsoft 365 Copilot, and as you may know we licensed 100% of employees at Advania UK - but it's not necessarily the answer to every AI question. Indeed, our team has solved AI challenges with "custom Copilot" approaches using Azure OpenAI that simply couldn't be done with M365 Copilot, including integrating large volumes of data from SaaS apps and custom databases, and steering the AI past the one-size-fits-all behaviour of Copilot. Despite its strengths, Copilot doesn't quite offer the flexibility or cost effectiveness needed for every AI scenario.
Major AI options on a slide
To help with AI strategy conversations, I produced the slide below which we're sharing here in case it's useful in your business (you can download it from the image below). It's an attempt to summarise some of the key factors and differences, though we'd be the first to say it doesn't cover every consideration and has some subjectivity to it. When asked a question like "where does X fit?" or "how should I think of Y?" question, I often put the slide up to call out some of the major factors and differences as we walk through some options.
When considering AI options, I see some of the major considerations as:
- Overall positioning and value prop ("Headline" in my slide)
- The cost model
- Costs
- Data sources - which company sources of data can the AI talk to?
- Automation - whether you can fully automate a process with the tool, or whether it's purely end-user driven
- The surface - where the AI shows up
- Key limitations
This kind of thinking and comparison is often what's missing from Microsoft and other vendors but where Advania expertise can help. The strengths of a technology are extolled in the Microsoft documentation and content, but rarely the limitations and "but bear in mind...." considerations. As an example, the Copilot Studio page is unlikely to ever say that it's a great technology for some use cases, "but good luck forecasting your run costs, because the pricing model makes it really hard!" However, it's factors like this which are hugely relevant if you're deciding (or paying for) the AI strategy for your organisation.
Here's the slide which compares major options and some of the factors:
Tip - to download the image, right-click and select "Save image as…"
Closing note
There's quite a lot of info (and some opinion) in the slide above, but we hope it's useful as a quick reference to some of the major Microsoft AI options. We should note that AI moves fast and some of the detail on limitations and costs will become out of date in time - if you'd like a conversation to check latest facts, or to talk through what's being conveyed here, or perhaps a wider discussion on AI strategy and options - we're here to help at Advania. Talk to your account manager and we'll get something set up with one of our AI experts.