In this week’s show, Paul and I explore Microsoft’s ever-expanding Copilot strategy, debate the complexities of Microsoft Places licensing, and discuss whether every AI feature really needs Copilot branding.
The Copilot Explosion
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of Copilot features and announcements, you’re not alone. As we discussed on the show, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all the different Copilot integrations – even for experienced Microsoft professionals.
Microsoft’s latest announcements demonstrate this perfectly. In Teams alone, we’re seeing Copilot arrive for file summaries in chat, intelligent meeting recaps for impromptu calls, and multi-language transcription capabilities, and in products like Places, features previously announced in 2022 now get a “Copilot” badge. While these are genuinely useful features – like automatically summarizing documents shared in chat or providing AI-generated meeting notes – the Copilot branding is becoming a little too ubiquitous.
As I mentioned during the show, it reminds me of playing Minecraft with my kids where they keep spawning the same thing repeatedly until you can’t see anything else. A year ago, many of these features would have simply been smart features – now everything seems to need the Copilot label – even agents that will work on Autopilot.
Microsoft Places: Great Potential, Complex Licensing
Several years after being announced, Microsoft Places.
The discussion around Microsoft Places highlighted a growing concern about Microsoft’s licensing strategy. While Places offers promising capabilities for hybrid work management – like AI-powered recommendations for office attendance and intelligent scheduling – the licensing requirements raise eyebrows.
As Paul pointed out, to fully utilize Places, organizations need multiple licenses: Teams, Teams Premium ($10 per user/month), and Copilot ($30 per user/month). Even with enterprise discounts, it’s a significant investment just to get recommendations about optimal office days.
While you could create a Power App to handle some of these features, the real value will come from the promised building management system integrations – though these are still in development.
The complexity doesn’t stop at licensing. Even Microsoft’s own documentation sometimes ties itself in knots trying to explain the features for requesting licensing. Paul shared a perfect example where the documentation describes requesting “a Copilot license from within Copilot” – a circular reference that perfectly illustrates the confusion many IT professionals and users face.
Read more about Microsoft Places in Microsoft’s announcement
Read more to find out which Places features are premium and included in core licensing
When AI Features Make Sense
Despite our criticisms, some of the new features show real promise. The expansion of intelligent meeting recap to impromptu calls and “Meet now” meetings makes perfect sense, especially when combined with the upcoming multi-language transcription support that can handle 51 spoken languages and 31 translation languages.
Read more about what’s new in Microsoft Teams
However, there’s a clear distinction between adding valuable AI capabilities and simply rebranding existing features under the Copilot umbrella. As we discussed, not everything needs to be AI-powered or Copilot-branded to be useful.
Post-Ignite Takeaways
The future of workplace technology is clearly going to include AI assistance, but organizations need clarity from Microsoft to separate generic smart or light-AI-assisted features from the premium “Copilot” add-ons. While Microsoft’s innovation in this space is impressive, there’s room for improvement in how these features are packaged, licensed, and explained to customers.
Join us in two weeks’ time for our next episode, where I’ll be joined by Rich Dean to explore the latest developments in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
It’s such a bummer to hear people continue to criticize Ignite being in Chicago. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable to complain about food issues, but for many of us throughout the Midwest – at orgs too small to have had “in person conference budgets” restored to even the paltry level they were at before Covid – the only chance we’ll ever have to get to something like Ignite is if it’s in Chicago. Places like Orlando, Seattle, or San Francisco are just never happening for us. So maybe I got a baloney sandwich, or lunch was served late, but at least there was a chance to be there!