Bing Chat , Microsoft 's AI-powered chatbot experience , is coming to businesses and will be called Bing Chat Enterprise.
At its annual Inspire conference, Microsoft unveiled Bing Chat Enterprise, a version of Bing Chat for data protection and governance control, but with a focus on enterprises. With Bing Chat Enterprise, chat data is not stored, Microsoft cannot view employee or business data, and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI models.
“We’ve heard from many customers that they’re ready to empower their organizations with powerful new AI tools, but they’re concerned that their company’s data won’t be protected,” Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, wrote in a blog post. “With Bing Chat Enterprise, every bit of data that goes in — and every bit of data that goes out — stays protected, empowering customers with better solutions, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative.”
Shaw said that when it comes to chatbots like Bing Chat, companies have expressed concerns about confidential data ending up with developers who trained the models on user data. Recently, Apple has restricted internal use of tools including OpenAI and Microsoft-owned GitHub’s Copilot, following Samsung, Walmart, Verizon, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and others.
Aside from the data controls, Bing Chat Enterprise, which is available in preview starting today, is functionally similar to Bing Chat — it answers queries in text as well as with charts and images. For example, an employee can ask Bing Chat Enterprise to create promotional content for a new product or compare a product with a competitor and include sensitive data like product specifications and prices in the comparison.
Coming soon, through an upcoming feature called Visual Search, Bing Chat Enterprise will be able to answer questions about uploaded images and search the web for related content. Visual Search is rolling out today to Bing Chat on mobile and web.
Yusuf Mehdi, head of consumer marketing at Microsoft, and Jared Spataro, CVP of modern work and enterprise apps, explain the details of Visual Search in a blog post:
“Visual search allows anyone to search the web for relevant content, using images instead of text. Take a photo or use one you find elsewhere and ask Bing to tell you about it — Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it.”
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Bing Chat Enterprise can be used anywhere Bing Chat is supported — including Bing.com/chat, the Microsoft Edge sidebar, and soon from Windows Copilot, the native version of Bing Chat on Windows. It is free for customers subscribed to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium, and will be available as a standalone offering in the future for $5 per user per month.
Bing Chat Enterprise is automatically enabled when an employee signs in to Bing with the Microsoft account associated with their organization. There’s pressure to monetize AI-powered chatbot technologies like Bing Chat. ChatGPT reportedly cost OpenAI tens of millions of dollars to process the millions of feeds fed into the software in January alone. Meanwhile, financial analysts estimate that Bing Chat, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, requires at least $4 billion in infrastructure to serve up answers to all of Bing’s users.
The launch of Bing Chat Enterprise comes several months after GitHub launched Copilot for Business, a $19-per-month enterprise version of its AI-powered code completion tool. For its part, OpenAI debuted ChatGPT Plus, a paid service that offers a number of benefits over the entry-level ChatGPT, including priority access to new features and improvements.
