Microsoft (MSFT) on Tuesday announced a variety of new AI products and updates as part of its annual Inspire conference. The biggest news comes in the form of Microsoft’s new Bing Chat Enterprise.
The software is designed to address issues companies have with using generative AI products like Bing in corporate settings. A number of major corporations, including Apple (AAPL) and Samsung, have banned the use of generative AI bots because they collect and can be trained on data you enter into the software.
The fear is that employees will enter sensitive information into chatbots, which could then leak out to the public. To ease customer concerns, Microsoft says that its Bing Chat Enterprise doesn’t save chat sessions and that no one at the company can ever see user information. What’s more, Microsoft says it doesn’t train Bing’s AI models using chat data at all.
The company is pitching this as a means for customers to use Bing Chat without having to worry about their confidential data hitting the open web.
In addition to Bing Chat Enterprise, Microsoft also announced its Microsoft 365 Copilot, which has been in early access, will officially cost $30 per month per user. The software allows corporate customers to access their own data via Microsoft’s generative AI functionality. Users can request information about spreadsheets, summarize meetings, and more, as well as access Bing AI web searches.
Microsoft previously launched its Azure AI Studio, which allows companies to create their own AI-powered copilots, apps that pair a firm’s data with Microsoft’s AI capabilities to complete a variety of tasks.
For instance, a business with a number of different healthcare plans could create a copilot that helps employees easily search for the appropriate plan for them. So if an employee needs insurance that covers eyeglasses, they would be able to use the copilot to search for it using natural language rather than having to read through pages of unrelated information.
Microsoft is in a tight race with rival Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) to determine which tech giant is the ultimate AI powerhouse. For years Alphabet has been in the lead thanks to work by its DeepMind and Google Research, which the company combined to form Google DeepMind in April.
But Microsoft has stolen much of Google’s thunder thanks to its multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. Microsoft has used OpenAI’s technologies to augment its own offerings ranging from Bing to its Edge browser and more.
Google, however, is fighting back, launching its own generative AI chatbot called Bard and an experimental version of its search engine that offers generative AI responses to user queries called Search Generative Experience. Google has also jumped into the enterprise space, adding generative AI capabilities to its Google Workspace suite.
Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.
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