Pharma CIO cancels Microsoft Copilot: Reaction
Have you seen the Business Insider post (subscription required) discussing the actions of a Pharma CIO who reportedly cancelled their Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription?
Dr Jeffrey Funk wrote an article on LinkedIn helpfully quoting some of the article text. Here are some choice paragraphs:
“A pharma company stopped using Microsoft's Copilot AI tool, with an exec citing high cost and low value.” “He compared the slide-generation capability of Microsoft's AI tools to middle school presentations, according to a transcript of a call with the Morgan Stanley analysts that was included in their research note.”
I'm a little surprised that any Pharma CIO agreed to pay $30 per user, per month for Copilot, multiplied by 500 users.
I'm paying $15 a month for my own personal Copilot. Was this some super-dooper Pharma-specific Copilot?
I just checked and I can add Copilot to my Corporate 365 account for £24.70 GBP or about $31. I'd expect the prices to be at least half for an Enterprise customer who's got a very serious Microsoft account management team on speed dial. I'd expect some very keen rates from Microsoft if I was buying 500+ licenses too.
Don't forget that this time last year, though, a lot of CIOs were making fantastic headlines for their companies by claiming to have "implemented AI" when all they actually did was buy some Copilot licenses.
I think there's strong value in giving employees access to something like Copilot, not least, because 90% of them are already unofficially using ChatGPT or some other public LLM that's sucking their data. Yes, you can ban access on the corporate network but have you checked the employee's phone? Have you checked what they're doing with their home PC?
I'd rather make sure everyone had access to the likes of Copilot (at a really, really good rate) and start making sure that every single one of those 500 licenses was being used properly, through all sorts of education and outreach efforts.
Yes, some ChatGPT and Copilot outputs can easily be compared to a Middle-School presentation. I saw that just last night when I asked ChatGPT to try something for me.
But, at the same time, the ideas, the concepts, the access-to-generic-knowledge is, I think, very useful.
I am augmented often by ChatGPT or Copilot. I use both of them and a lot of other services too. Perplexity, for example, and Pi.
But they don't write for me.
They don't author anything.
I write everything.
It's my words. My language, my original work, all the time.
But the ideas that pop out are often enough to get the (human) neurons firing.
I will often ask these LLMs to review my documents. Occasionally there are good suggestions.
For example, only yesterday, for a proposal was writing, ChatGPT suggested I add numbers to the headings 'for clarity'. I liked that. Adopted it. Implemented.
So there's some value to be had from these LLMs. Perhaps it's not necessarily $34 per month, per user though.
I also think there's a lot of value from being able to use something like Copilot where it can begin to leverage your internal knowledge - although admittedly I haven't been able to try this myself. To truly try it out properly, I think you need to be working in a large enterprise.
I'm thinking about adding it to my own "1-seat Microsoft 365 enterprise account". I should really try it.
Update: I looked again. Once I've actually logged in, the pricing Microsoft is presenting for my single user Enterprise tenancy is $360 per year for Copilot. I have a choice of either per year or per 3 years. If it was per month, I'd have tried it out. Per year... I'm going to think about it. Interesting that I'm apparently getting better rates than that Pharma CIO.
Update 2, 30th August 2024: I heard from one reader that in their experience, Microsoft isn't budging on price. That's quite unfortunate. I'd find that quite frustrating if all my end-users weren't using Copilot. I've also updated the Copilot pricing to $30/month based on their feedback. (I had previously put the figure at $34.)
