Microsoft says new AI security chatbot pricing model lets customers ‘buy what they need’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight event in Seoul on Nov. 15, 2022. Nadella gave a keynote speech at an event hosted by the company’s Korean unit.
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft is rolling out an unorthodox pricing model for its new security chatbot that becomes available to the public on April 1.
As part of a swarm of generative artificial intelligence announcements last year, Microsoft introduced a preview last March of Copilot for Security, which taps large language models to help cybersecurity professionals understand critical issues.
On Wednesday, Microsoft said it will use a consumption-based model, charging $4 per “security compute unit.” Andrew Conway, vice president of security marketing at Microsoft, said the types of prompts and summaries will vary dramatically in size, depending on the customer and type of workload.
“Customers can buy what they need, and that can easily be changed over time without friction,” Conway said in a statement.
Security is a significant business for Microsoft, accounting for more than $20 billion in revenue in 2022, making it larger than gaming or search advertising at the time. Gaming is now bigger with the acquisition late last year of Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft has broadly been working to add generative AI from OpenAI into Windows, Dynamics business applications and other products. Wall Street has been eager to see how Microsoft will be able to make money from AI after investing billions of dollars in OpenAI and AI-related data center equipment.
The pricing for Copilot for Security is designed to keep expenses low for organizations that experiment with the tool while scaling for power users. Microsoft considered input from early customers as well as the costs of tapping OpenAI’s LLMs that process users’ prompts, Vasu Jakkal, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, told CNBC.
Microsoft charges for use of its Azure OpenAI Service based on the number of tokens a client uses. Each token is equal to about four English characters.
It’s a much more convoluted pricing model than other Microsoft tools released of late, such as customer service and general productivity assistants. The Copilot for Microsoft 365 costs $30 per person per month for companies.
BP is an early customer of the new security service. Chip Calhoun, the company’s vice president of cyber defense, said in an email that, “Copilot has made us more efficient and helped us to find attack patterns that could easily be missed without specific use cases.”
Copilot for Security can answer questions by drawing on information from Microsoft’s own security products and third-party providers. It can explain security vulnerabilities, analyze scripts, answer questions about devices and summarize incidents.
Other security software companies dabbling in generative AI include CrowdStrike, which has a chatbot called Charlotte that costs $20 a year per device.
Cyberattacks are becoming a bigger threat by the day. Microsoft said in January that a Russian intelligence group had accessed some of its executives’ email accounts. Roku and UnitedHealth also said they were hit by attacks this year.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s most recent earnings call that the latest spate of cyberattacks “highlighted the urgent need for organizations to move even faster to protect themselves from cyberthreats.”
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he wants to integrate ChatGPT artificial intelligence capabilities into the travel platform but the software isn’t ready.
“The [software development kit] wasn’t quite robust enough for the things we want to do,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
Chesky said the company would “probably” want to integrate ChatGPT eventually.
Airbnb on Tuesday launched a series of new social features, such as direct messaging, to its platform. The update also included a personalized version of the company’s chatbot launched earlier this year that can cancel and change reservations for users in North America.
In an interview with Bloomberg this week, Chesky said that the OpenAI chatbot isn’t “quite ready” for integration with Airbnb. He said the model was made using 13 different chatbots and that Airbnb is depending heavily on Alibaba’s Qwen model.
Chesky, who is a close friend of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said it’s only the beginning of the AI revolution and he expects the technology to fuel a consumer app craze over the next few years.
“We’re all going to have to work together,” he said. “AI is going to lift up a lot of companies. If they want to vertically integrate every single thing, that’s going to be very, very difficult.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
The company announced the cuts in a memo from its Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit and other product-related positions will be impacted.
Axios was first to report the cuts.
Meta has been aggressively investing in AI as it works to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google, pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and recruitment.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $27 billion deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund and develop its massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana. The data center is expected to be large enough to cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post in July.
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