News

Bing Chat Enterprise Debuts: 'More than 160 Million People Already Have Access'

• By David Ramel
• 07/18/2023

Microsoft is doubling down on its big bet on AI-assisted software by today announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, which the company said expands the "new Bing" experience to a ready-made user base of more than 160 million people.

Now in preview, Bing Chat Enterprise builds on the "new Bing" AI-powered search experience with commercial data protection that ensures enterprise data is protected and not leaked outside an organization. Use cases range from understanding the implications of a business decision to writing better code to generating social media content.

The "new Bing" search experience -- announced in February and receiving a big makeover in May -- is powered by advanced generative AI constructs created by OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion. The generative AI tech is similar to that powering the chatbot experience of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's available in the Edge sidebar (which offers Chat, Compose and Insights) and at Bing.com/chat. Bing Chat Enterprise is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium.

With that broad reach, the new offering comes with a huge ready-made audience, according to Microsoft.

"We're significantly expanding Bing to reach new audiences with Bing Chat Enterprise, delivering AI-powered chat for work, and rolling out today in Preview -- which means that more than 160 million people already have access," the company said.

Plans call for a future stand-alone offering for $5 per user/per month, along with access from Windows Copilot, the "copilot" name being adopted for all kinds of Microsoft AI assistants.

With commercial data protection, chat data is not saved, and Microsoft doesn't even have eyes-on access to it. Also, chat data is not used to train the company's underlying machine language models. In addition to the commercial data protection, the enterprise flavor of new Bing comes with managed access via Microsoft Entra ID, which until recently was called Azure Active Directory.

Microsoft listed several use cases for the new service:

• Understand the implications of a decision: "What are the pros and cons of offline marketing strategies?" and "How can I measure the success of my offline marketing campaign?"
• Learn new skills: "What are the top 5 things I should know when managing a large project?" and "What is agile project management and how does it differ from waterfall?"
• Analyze data: "If we're forecasting 7 percent EPS growth this coming quarter, how does our internal forecast compare with EPS growth in the top US public CPG companies?"
• Summarize a work PDF open in Edge: "Recap the findings of this internal cybersecurity report and the top 3 concerns" and "What are best practices for addressing these kinds of security issues?"
• Write better code faster: "Write a regular expression in Python that matches email addresses" or "How can I use the unittest module to write test units for my Python code."
• Plan a business trip: "Where should I stay in Manhattan that has a good running path close by?"
• Generate social media content: "Use this messaging framework to generate 5 social media posts describing its value to healthcare workers."

More information can be found in Bing Chat Enterprise documentation.

Bing Chat Enterprise was announced July 18 at the company's Inspire event, where Microsoft also announced the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, described as the next generation of the company's partner program "empowering every partner to deliver customer value by leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud."

The company also announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be priced at $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers, when broadly available. Specific timing information is expected within months.