Microsoft has been going all-out with its AI efforts, which are clearly the future of the company. Starting with Copilot launching last year, Microsoft has kept expanding its AI initiatives, including the launch of Copilot Pro and most recently, Copilot+. But with such confusing naming schemes, it's getting harder to separate what sets Copilot, Copilot Pro, and Copilot+ apart.

If you, too, find these names confusing, we're here to help clear things up. Let's take a look at these three products and what they actually offer.

Microsoft Copilot

The foundation of Microsoft's AI efforts

At the heart of all of these products is the core Microsoft Copilot platform. Copilot was originally born as Bing Chat back at the start of 2023, and it was a chatbot similar to ChatGPT. In fact, Copilot uses the same large language model (LLM) as ChatGPT, with the current latest version (as of May 2024) being GPT-4o. The Copilot chat also infuses Bing search into its capabilities, so you can combine its linguistic capabilities with the ability to crawl the web for the most recent information. Copilot can do more than chat, too. It can leverage the DALL-E model to generate images, for example.

But where Copilot starts to stand out is its integration with other Microsoft products. If you're running Windows 11, the Copilot button on your taskbar also gives you access to extra capabilities, where Copilot can change some system settings for you. For example, you can ask Copilot to take a screenshot for you, or turn on dark mode, empty the recycle bin, and more.

Copilot also integrates with a lot of Microsoft's products across Microsoft 365, Viva, Dynamics 365, and so on. These are mostly paid products, but all of it revolves around this same foundation of Copilot, but tailored to handle different kinds of data.

Copilot Pro

A subscription service that's... better

With AI and Copilot being as popular as they are, Microsoft naturally felt inclined to make money off of it, and there are users enthusiastic enough to pay for a subset of additional features. And so, in comes Copilot Pro. This is a subscription service that offers a few benefits if you already love using Copilot in your daily life.

One big advantage of Copilot Pro, at least at launch, is that it gets you early access to the latest AI models available. For example, when GPT-4 Turbo became available, it was first built into Copilot only for Copilot Pro users. Copilot Pro also gets you faster responses during peak usage time since your queries are prioritized, and similarly, image generation in Microsoft Designer is faster if you have the subscription.

On top of all that, paying for Copilot Pro means you can use Copilot in certain Microsoft 365 apps, such as Word or PowerPoint. Copilot can help you quickly draft a document based on key points, expand on a rough draft, and much more. However, you need to be paying for Microosft 365 to begin with, so you have to be paying at least $7/month for Microsoft 365, and then another $20/month for Copilot Pro. And, for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions, Copilot Pro costs $20 per user, so if you want everyone in the family to be included, that gets pretty expensive.

It's worth noting here that Copilot Pro and Copilot for Microsoft 365 are different products, though. Copilot Pro is designed for consumers, and it does integrate with Microsoft 365 apps, but Copilot for Microsoft 365 is made for business users. That one actually costs a bit more (at $30 per user per month), but it also has a few more capabilities like Teams integration.

Copilot+

AI that runs on your PC

The most recent addition to the Copilot family is Copilot+, but it's actually a bit different from the rest of the Copilot offerings. Microsoft is using the term "Copilot+ PC", which refers to computers with a more powerful NPU, with at least 40TOPS of AI performance at INT8 precision.

What this means is that now, your PC can run a lot of AI tasks locally, so you don't have to rely on the cloud for processing. But many of these features aren't part of the usual Copilot feature set. For example, Copilot+ includes a new feature called Recall. It's kind of similar to the Timeline in Windows 10, but it can use AI to identify what you're seeing at any given moment. So when you want to go back to a document you were working on, you can search for the words in that document to easily find it.

Other Copilot+ features include the ability to run Cocreator in Paint locally, it enables new Windows Studio Effects such as filters, live captions with real-time translation, AI-powered upscaling for games, and more. Plus, some Copilot workloads can run locally on your PC now.

All of these features come at no additional cost if your PC is supported, but only new PCs are capable of handling it. The only processors with an NPU capable of 40TOPS or more are the Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chips. However, Intel and AMD will soon join the ranks with their Arrow Lake and Strix Point lineups. It's also likely that more features will be added as NPUs become more powerful, and those features may be exclusive to newer devices.

These products aren't competing

The biggest thing to take away from all this is that Copilot Pro and Copilot+ aren't competing with each other, and in fact, do very different things. While both are AI-based products, Copilot Pro is a subscription service that enhances the capabilities of Copilot across chat and image generation, on top of bringing its capabilities to Microsoft 365 apps.

Meanwhile, Copilot+ is a set of tools that run locally on your computer. They're also AI-based and rely on language models, but they're not features that are usually a part of Copilot, and you can't get them by just paying for them. Copilot+ exists to leverage AI hardware you can get in your hands, so you need a supported computer. At the same time, you can't use Copilot+ to replace any of the features of Copilot Pro, either.

Of course, as both products evolve, it's possible that this separation becomes different or disappears altogether. It's still early days for AI, so things are going to change a lot over the next few years.