Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC today revamped the pricing of the generative artificial intelligence features built into their respective productivity suites.

The changes are part of an effort on the companies’ part to boost the adoption of their AI tools among business users. Microsoft ships an AI assistant called Copilot as part of its Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Google, in turn, offers the Gemini machine learning feature bundle to users of its rival Workspace suite.

The flagship AI offering in Microsoft 365 is an add-on called Microsoft 365 Copilot that costs $30 per user per month. The company also provides a free tier of the add-on with more limited capabilities. One of the main differences between the two is that whereas the paid edition embeds an AI assistant directly into Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, the free tier doesn’t. 

Today, Microsoft rolled out a new version of the add-on’s free tier called Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. The main change is that users can now create AI agents, custom AI tools capable of automatically performing business tasks. This capability was previously only available in the paid add-on.

AI agents can be created with natural language prompts in a tool called Copilot Studio. A marketing team, for example, could build an agent that extracts key details from ad campaign performance data. Customer service teams can use the feature to automatically generate responses to common user inquiries.

Microsoft will bill agents based on a usage metric called messages. Each user prompt that Copilot Studio processes using a large language model counts as two messages, while prompts sent to a less advanced AI use one message apiece. Requests that require an agent to analyze a company’s business files using the Microsoft Graph feature in Microsoft 365 will consume 30 messages.

If a company opts for pay-as-you-go billing, each message costs one cent. Organizations can also purchase prepaid agent packs that cost $200 and provide 25,000 messages per month.

“Answers are charged for every agent response, not for user prompts,” Richard Riley, general manager of Microsoft’s Power Platform business, wrote in a blog post. “As makers build agents, they can define conversational topics, create branching logic flows and apply generative AI to create responses based on knowledge sources.”

The debut of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat today coincided with an update to Gemini, the AI toolkit that Google ships with its Workspace productivity suite. The latter upgrade is likewise designed to expand the AI features’ adoption among business users.

The update is rolling out to the Business and Enterprise tiers of Workspace. Until now, accessing the full lineup of Gemini features required buying an add-on priced at $20 per user month. With today’s update, Google is removing that requirement. It will make the full Gemini feature set available out of the box with all Business and Enterprise subscriptions, which will cost $2 more per user per month going forward.

Customers of the two Workplace plans already had access to a limited version of Gemini. This version lacked a sidebar that allows users to interact with the AI directly from the interface of Workspace apps such as Drive. With today’s update, customers with Business and Enterprise plans will gain access to the sidebar.

There are also other enhancements. According to 9to5Mac, customers who used the free, limited version of Gemini will be upgraded to a more capable LLM called Gemini Advanced with 1.5 Pro. They will also receive access to an AI agent creation tool called Gems and NotebookLM, a note-taking app that doubles as a research tool. 

“By removing the need to pay for an add-on to access our latest generative AI capabilities, we’re simplifying our plans and pricing to bring the added value of Google AI to all Workspace customers,” Jerry Dischler, Google’s president of cloud applications, wrote in a blog post.

Image: Microsoft