CoPilot CoWork explained: access, features, billing (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: CoPilot CoWork is now generally available. For some people, it finally delivers on that promise of a personal assistant, or even a collaborative teammate powered by AI. But it's not actually available to everybody. And there are some interesting challenges when it comes to how you pay for it. So today, we're actually going to cover three very important things that you need to know about CoPilot CoWork. Of course, we'll start with a tour and show how to use it. And then we'll compare CoPilot CoWork to Clawed CoWork, just to help you decide which one you should use. Then I'll explain how the subscriptions and the billing actually work. So let's jump in. Of course, if you've used an AI chat like CoPilot before, then you're used to sending a single prompt at a time and getting a single response. This is useful, but limited. Instead of the prompt response workflow, CoWork has a task outcome workflow. So CoWork can design a plan, take multiple steps to act on that plan independently, and deliver a multi-step outcome. Now, CoPilot CoWork is not available in the free version of CoPilot, and it's not available in the personal subscription either. It's only available for Microsoft 365 business or enterprise users. So we're talking about people who have a Microsoft account that is managed by their company or a similar organization. So you can go to the CoPilot website and sign into your business or enterprise account and look for the CoWork option in the side panel there. If you see that option, you can toggle between CoPilot and CoWork. However, since you're working with an account managed by your company or a similar organization, your organization's Microsoft administrator has to enable CoWork for you. That also means they have to opt into the usage-based billing system that we'll see later in this video. If your administrator has not done that, then you will see a page where you can send a request to the administrator asking them to enable it. If you do have access to CoWork, then you will see what looks like just another prompt field, but we're not starting a new chat, we're starting a new task. Consider larger projects that will take several steps to complete. For example, I want CoWork to help me plan an event. So that means schedules, that means task assignments, that means planning documents, and a lot more. So I'll start by saying, last year we had a Volunteer Day event and I want to do it again in August. I want you to find everybody who contributed last time. And to help CoWork find that information, you could upload files for it to reference, or you can refer to specific documents stored in your Microsoft account. But CoWork can actually search your documents and your company data all by itself. So you could just give it instructions and let it find what it needs from your work data. I'll hit Shift-Enter to start a new line, then I'll tell it to identify a tentative date and time and schedule any meetings we need. I'll tell it to message the team members to let them know what we're working on and create a spreadsheet for task assignments, a presentation, and any other necessary documents. So you can give it several different explicit instructions, or you can ask it to make a plan and decide what needs to be done. When you're ready, send the prompt. Multi-step projects like this will take time, but with CoWork, you don't have to leave the window open and wait for the result. You can close the window and the task will continue to run. So I'll skip forward in time and we'll come back and check on it later. And later, when I go back to the CoPilot website and go to the CoWork option, I see that task is listed in the side panel. I can select it and see the progress. And depending on your project, you may have to approve some individual steps. So here, I see it's ready to schedule a meeting, but more importantly, we're seeing CoWork come back with several results. It's planning and scheduling meetings and even inviting the necessary people. You can approve each event individually, or you can give it permission to create all of the necessary events. And if it drafts email messages, you can approve those the same way, or you may want to make changes to the messages before they send. You may see other tasks, but in this case, ultimately, it created some documents, which I can open or download from here. And they've also been saved to my OneDrive. And as I requested, it's given me additional recommendations for this project. So CoWork understood what needed to be done. It devised a plan, it found the information it needed, and it executed on that plan. This is that task outcome workflow. You are the director of the plan and CoWork is your AI partner. Now, there's a lot more that CoWork can do, and we can't cover everything, but I at least wanted to take a look at scheduled tasks. So let's look at a project that I already have set up. It started with a prompt, and a common thing people use CoWork for is to create a weekly brief. I told CoWork to find outstanding tasks from my previous week and from the coming week and send me an email and a briefing document. And I told it to do this every Monday morning using plain language. We can see the result, the briefing along with a Word document, and it sent the email to me. And because I told it to do that every Monday morning, we can go to the scheduled section and see that it created a scheduled task, which will run every Monday morning at 9 a.m. So you can ask CoWork to design a complex project with scheduled tasks. Or if you wanna set up something more straightforward, you can click the Create button here, and CoPilot will help you define the scheduled tasks that you want. Now, before we move on, I also wanna point out the Customize section where you can configure CoPilot to use plugins that enable connections to other apps. And you can set up skills. CoWork already has built-in skills to create documents, schedule events, send messages, and more. Creating your own skills is certainly an option here, but a topic we'll have to save for another video. So that's your quick introduction to CoPilot CoWork, but we still have a few other important points to address. You may be wondering, in fact, I hope you're wondering, what about Cloud CoWork? Does it do the same thing? Well, this one actually has a really easy answer. Yes, Cloud CoWork is very similar. If you go to the Cloud website, you will not see CoWork there. You will need to install the Cloud application for Mac or Windows. And in the app, you can switch between Cloud Chat and Cloud CoWork. You can start a new task, just like in CoPilot CoWork, and you can open existing tasks and continue working on them. I created a task to review a transcript and some meeting documents, then create a project proposal. Not the most complex project, but it is a multi-step project with multiple outputs, just like we saw in CoPilot CoWork. So which should you use, Cloud CoWork or CoPilot CoWork? Well, I think the main criteria comes down to whether you work at a company or similar organization that requires you to work with Microsoft 365. Cloud CoWork is available with any paid Cloud subscription. So if you buy a Cloud Pro or Mac subscription as an individual, or if your company has a license for your team, Cloud CoWork is available. Fairly straightforward. CoPilot CoWork, on the other hand, has a more complicated billing system, which we'll explore more in a moment. And it's only available to people already in a Microsoft 365 organization. So to put it simply, if you're working alone as an individual, I recommend you buy your own Cloud subscription and use Cloud CoWork. Or if you're in an organization that uses Cloud, then again, you can use Cloud CoWork. But if you're in an organization that uses Microsoft 365, CoPilot CoWork is your solution. Now, if you're planning to use CoPilot CoWork, then we should finish by looking into that usage-based billing system, because this is a common question. But first, a disclaimer. This is just a guide to help you find Microsoft's billing resources. Do not make any purchases based only on this video. It's up to you to review this material and evaluate the cost for your team. With that in mind, if you go to the CoPilot pricing website, we see the price of a CoPilot subscription. Now, the core Microsoft 365 CoPilot chat subscription does not support CoWork. You would need the full Microsoft 365 CoPilot business or enterprise subscription. But what's not immediately clear is that CoWork also requires additional CoPilot credits that are not included in those subscriptions. Each time a user starts a task in CoWork, it consumes a certain amount of credits, and these credits are paid for separately. But how do you know the value of a credit? How many will you need? Well, for that, we'll scroll down and go to the line item for CoWork and click the link for metered costs. And on this page, I recommend you click the link for the CoPilot credits guide. And we see at the time of this recording, a single CoPilot credit is worth one cent in the US. Of course, that could change in the future, so check this page. This document also has a grid to help you estimate how many credits will be used for each type of task in CoWork. This is only an estimate, so I suggest that administrators start with this, monitor usage, and evaluate the costs over time. And individuals can refer to this just to get an idea of how much of an expense they're requesting when they ask for access to CoWork. So for administrators, how do you set this up? Well, in the Microsoft 365 admin tool, which only administrators can access, there's a section for CoPilot. In that section, there's an option for cost management, and there's a button here to get started. And from there, an administrator can set rules for the monthly spending limit for the entire organization or a limit for individual users. Alternatively, there is also an option to purchase a large block of prepaid credits upfront. But whichever you choose, after the billing is set up, the administrator will then need to go to that CoPilot category, then to settings, then to view all, and find the option for AI experiences enabled by usage-based billing, and make sure to allow those experiences. And after that's set up, then team members in that organization can go to CoPilot, switch over to CoWork, and they can work there. So now I think you have a good idea of the power that CoWork can offer and what it takes to get started. So will it become your new AI-powered assistant? Let me know in the comments. And if you need a closer look at CoPilot or customized training for your team, you can reach out to me or many of the other trainers here on Kevin Stratford's YouTube channel. Just head over to kevinstratford.com slash training.