Employees Favor ChatGPT Over Copilot, Frustrating Microsoft and Prompting Price Cuts

In a recent piece by Bloomberg, it elaborates on how OpenAI is encroaching upon its main investor’s territory in the corporate sales sector where Microsoft has traditionally held sway. According to the publication, Microsoft faces significant hurdles in selling its AI assistant because employees at client companies have become accustomed to using ChatGPT and are reluctant to switch.

For instance, last spring, pharmaceutical giant Amgen purchased 20,000 licenses for Copilot, but this year they expanded their use of ChatGPT, as employees consistently reported to management that this app was more effective for finding and summarizing scientific articles. This isn’t an isolated incident: a report from consulting firm Bain & Co. indicates that 16,000 employees regularly utilize ChatGPT while only 2,000 use Copilot.

As Sean Breich, Vice President of Amgen, puts it, «OpenAI has made its product incredibly engaging.» The company is capitalizing on ChatGPT’s market lead—OpenAI reports that the number of corporate users has reached 3 million, up 50% in recent months. Given that Copilot employs the same models, Microsoft struggles to clarify to clients why their offering is superior. The company does not disclose actual sales figures, instead stating that their assistant is used by 70% of Fortune 500 companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft emphasizes that their product costs $30 per user, compared to OpenAI’s pricing that can reach $60. In response, OpenAI has started to implement usage-based pricing, which often negates the price advantage.

Although Microsoft is OpenAI’s primary investor, having injected $14 billion into the company, the relationship between the two firms is increasingly strained. Microsoft is exploring the use of competing products within its services while simultaneously developing its own models. Concurrently, OpenAI has been sealing deals with rival cloud service providers and acquired Windsurf, a direct competitor of GitHub Copilot. Additionally, I would note that The Information recently reported that OpenAI is preparing to launch a collaborative mode for multiple users in Canvas, but the company hesitates to release it as it would directly compete with Office products and further sour relations between the two companies.

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