Microsoft is introducing Bing Chat Enterprise, an enterprise-focused version of its AI-powered chatbot experience. This version includes data privacy and governance controls specifically designed for business needs. With Bing Chat Enterprise, chat data is not saved, Microsoft cannot access a customer’s employee or business data, and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI models.
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, addressed the concerns of corporate customers about data protection in a blog post. By using Bing Chat Enterprise, organizations can ensure that their data remains protected while benefiting from powerful AI tools, improved efficiency, and enhanced creativity.
Companies have raised concerns about confidential data being exposed to developers who train chatbot models using user data. Apple recently restricted the internal use of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft-owned GitHub’s Copilot, following similar actions by Samsung, Walmart, Verizon, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and others.
A survey by Cyberhaven revealed that a significant number of employees have copied and pasted sensitive company data into chatbots like ChatGPT. Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise addresses these concerns and offers robust data controls. Functionally, it is similar to Bing Chat, providing text-based answers as well as responses with graphs, charts, and images. Employees can utilize Bing Chat Enterprise to generate messaging for new products, compare products with competitors, and include sensitive data in their prompts, such as product specifications and pricing.
An upcoming feature called Visual Search will enable Bing Chat Enterprise to answer questions related to uploaded images and search the web for relevant content. Visual Search is already being rolled out in Bing Chat on mobile and the web.
Yusuf Mehd, consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, and Jared Spataro, CVP of modern work and business apps, provided insights into Visual Search in a blog post. They explained that users can upload images and prompt Bing to provide information about them. Bing can interpret the context of an image and answer questions accordingly.
Bing Chat Enterprise can be used wherever Bing Chat is supported, including Bing.com/chat, the Microsoft Edge sidebar, and soon from Windows Copilot, the Windows-native version of Bing Chat. It is currently free for customers subscribed to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium. In the future, it will be available as a standalone offering at a cost of $5 per user per month.
The monetization of viral AI-powered chatbot technologies, such as Bing Chat, is becoming increasingly important. OpenAI reportedly invested millions of dollars in processing prompts fed into ChatGPT in January alone. Financial analysts estimate that Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, requires at least $4 billion of infrastructure to handle responses for all Bing users.
The introduction of Bing Chat Enterprise follows the launch of GitHub’s Copilot for Business, an enterprise version of the AI-powered code completion tool. Additionally, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Plus, a paid service that offers various benefits over the base-level ChatGPT, including priority access to new features and improvements.
