Let’s start with what’s not changed. All the Chat features in Copilot are still included in the subscription. You can continue to search your emails, ask questions about your files, and generate messages and documents through the built-in agents in Outlook and Word. Nothing there is different. The only piece that changed today is the “Cowork” section. You’ll even notice that Microsoft moved it away from being an Agent in the Chat section to a totally separate Cowork section in the interface, and clear way to distinguish what’s included and what’s not.

What makes Cowork so different from Chat is its ability to chain together actions. I just looked at some examples of recent chats versus Cowork prompts to get an idea of how much different the work is between the two. I pushed hard to try and uncover a pattern in my emails from a specific client in Chat. I forced it through a couple of prompts to dig deep into all my emails. At the end, I asked it to guess as to how many tokens we used during that investigation, and it replied that we probably used around 25,000 tokens. Meanwhile, with just a couple of prompts to Cowork, I was able to get a 60-page Word document created using a bunch of policy examples. This process took several minutes, and at the end I asked the same question. The reply was that we probably used close to 2.5 million tokens, or 100x as many. This just gives you an idea of how easy it is to push Cowork to do a ton of work.

I have no doubt that Microsoft saw that once Cowork was made available to users, their token usage went through the roof. I can understand that this level of processing power cannot be included in a $21 per month subscription without incurring huge losses to the company. I just wish that they had made it clear that this would be an add-on from the get-go. Maybe they did and I just missed it, but I certainly didn’t know how much it would cost when I was writing about how this tool could change the way we all work.

Regarding how much that cost is, one thing that we do have exact numbers on is how many credits each Cowork session uses. At any time, you can prompt Cowork with “/cost” and it will tell you. That 60-page Word document, and its 2.5M tokens resolved to 2,281.2 credits used. I looked back through my usage for the past week, and I was close to 8,000 credits per day. I have been working on financial forecasting, and I’ve been hitting it hard, to be fair. At Microsoft’s price of $.01 per credit, I would have racked up close to $250 in credits in that one project. Today’s document alone would cost $22.81.

This new realization got me thinking about what I could do to limit the cost but still get the benefit from Cowork. I have plenty of hardware with a gaming computer at home that has a large video card in it, capable of running decently strong AI models. But I need my data to get into that also. Microsoft calls this Work IQ, where all the models it offers in Copilot have access to all your information. And it’s remarkable when it brings up an email or chat in a place that I wouldn’t expect it. It can really help to bring insight into my decisions. But to access Work IQ, you’ll need to build out a connector and queries to it will cost credits also.

I, like most business owners, have a lot to think about regarding AI costs now. Sure, you can spend thousands of dollars building out an infrastructure to run your own models. I think the current GDX Spark devices at around $5,000 a pop is a great example of how a small business could get serious hardware at a decent price. But even devices custom-built for AI like that aren’t going to be as good as what you get from Copilot Cowork. And the plumbing and maintenance to keep them running will cost a lot of time and effort.

I wish I knew what to recommend here. But I’m just not sure that we are all ready to start paying the real price for AI.

-Nate