Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new version of Microsoft 365 that’s embedded from top to bottom with AI features — for twice the monthly price of its Personal plan.
Unlike the $10 Personal and $13 Family plans, however, Microsoft 365 Premium includes higher limits on AI features like image creation. It also adds access to some of the company’s Copilot tools including Researcher, Analyst, Photos Agent and Actions for up to six people at $20. Microsoft has been working features such as Agent Mode into its popular Office apps, but has not previously offered a full bundle of AI-driven software for people outside business settings. It also recently added the option to use Anthropic’s Claude AI models with Copilot.
ChatGPT’s 4o image generation has also been part of Copilot since earlier this year.
In an interesting wrinkle, Microsoft said in a blog post that the AI features will only be available to the subscription owner and can’t be shared. The Copilot features for Excel will also not work unless a file set to AutoSave and shared to OneDrive.
Microsoft has even updated its icons for apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint to «reflect the new era of AI.» The new app icons look more three-dimensional than previous iterations — a bit like gummi candies.
Those app icon changes will roll out to all 365 users over the next few weeks across desktop and mobile versions of the software.
What’s included in 365 Premium
So what’s new in the 365 Premium version? According to Microsoft the subscription includes:
- Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and other 365 apps with Copilot built in.
- Access to Researcher and Analyst, which was previously only available to commercial customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Those AI agent features will be incorporated into Word, PowerPoint and Excel sometime soon.
- Higher usage limits for image generation and a new Voice feature that is also coming soon.
- Access to other Copilot features including Podcasts, Deep Research, Vision and Actions.
- A Photos Agent app.
- 1 TB of cloud storage.
- An advanced version of Microsoft Defender.
What’s changing for everyone else
If you aren’t upgrading to 365 Premium, you’ll still get some new features and changes beyond the refreshed icons.
Those changes include:
- Higher usage limits for Copilot features for Personal and Family plans.
- Copilot Chat will be available in 365 apps.
- Access to experimental AI features through the new Frontier program.
- College students will still get access to 365 Personal for free for a year. The company is expanding that offer, which is good until Oct. 31, to most markets around the world.
Microsoft said it’s also adding ways for people to access their home documents from work, and vice-versa, securely with an account switcher option that will also work with the new Copilot apps including Researcher and Analyst.
According to Microsoft, its data suggests that 82% of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work.
