TMTPost -- TMTPost App learned Copilot for business was recently available in Greater China, and nearly 200 businesses in the market has deployed the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant developed by Microsoft.

Credit：Microsoft

As of now, Chinese enterprises who had been users of Microsoft 365 suite for business can get access to local Copilot services in Microsoft products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, etc. However, it operations such as networking, AI-powered chat, and creating images from text still require support of network services. “Our enterprise customers in Greater China has leveraged Copilot since last November, “an official at Microsoft’s business group in the Greater China region said at an event eariler this week. “In the past two or three months, we have received very encouraging first-hand feedback. Some customers said that Copilot helped them save at least more than ten hours of working time in a month.” The services related to Bing Chat and Copilot Network is currently inaccessible in the Chinese market due to data compliance and the cross-border data center,  a person familiar with the matter told TMTPost.

Copilot is the new name for Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise, and it's available in over 160 countries and regions and the Simplified Chinese is supported. The abovementioned person told TMTPost that the support of local Copilot for Chinese is relatively not strong as the AI service is unavailable for connecting to the internet.Moreover, some features of Microsoft 365 Copilot have certain limitations compared with those in other regions. For example, when it comes to networking, enterprise customers have to resort WeChat and other platforms since they can not get access to features related to search engines such as Microsoft Bing Chat  in the Chinese market.

Copilot is a generative AI service grounded in data from the public web in the Bing search index only. It doesn't have access to organizational resources or content within the Microsoft 365 Graph, such as documents in OneDrive, emails, or other data, even when commercial data protection is turned on. Copilot for Microsoft 365 adds three things: Access to data within the Microsoft 365 Graph in your tenant. Prompts and responses are processed entirely within your Microsoft 365 tenant boundary, along with other Microsoft 365-specific security, compliance, and privacy features. Access to this generative AI capability from Microsoft 365 applications like Teams, Outlook, and Word.

Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot in March 2023, combining the power of large language models (LLMs) with users data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn people’s words into a powerful productivity tool. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It is embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps— Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more. Microsoft also unveiled a  brand-new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and users  data — their calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts, so as to enables users to generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads when they give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy”. Microsoft launched Copilot for Microsoft 65 for all businesses in November, removing the requirement for at least 300 users that customers have to commit to.  Businesses of all sizes can purchase Copilot in Microsoft 365 at US$30 per user per month.