Microsoft is officially sunsetting Copilot Pro and introducing a brand-new subscription tier designed to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus.
The new plan, called Microsoft 365 Premium, consolidates AI-powered Office features with the company’s productivity suite in a single, streamlined subscription.
At $19.99 per month, Premium lands at the exact same price point as ChatGPT Plus, setting the stage for a head-to-head battle for the AI productivity crown.
"We believe that embedding AI into the flow of work unlocks new levels of productivity, helping everyone work smarter, faster, and more creatively." said Yusuf Mehdi, Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, Microsoft.
But where OpenAI leans on model access and chat-first workflows, Microsoft is going all-in on its strongest differentiator: Office integration.
The End of Copilot Pro, the Birth of Premium
When Microsoft launched Copilot Pro in late 2023, it was positioned as a power-user add-on: an extra $20 per month on top of an existing Microsoft 365 subscription, giving users priority access to cutting-edge AI models, higher usage limits, and exclusive features like GPT-powered design tools.
But the two-tier system proved confusing. Earlier this year, Microsoft began bundling Copilot features directly into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans, effectively blurring the lines between Copilot Pro and its mainstream offerings.
Now, with the arrival of Microsoft 365 Premium, the separation is gone. Copilot Pro will no longer be sold, and Premium will serve as Microsoft’s flagship AI + productivity subscription for consumers.
What’s in Microsoft 365 Premium?
Premium combines Microsoft’s full Office suite with its most advanced AI capabilities. Here’s what subscribers get for $19.99 per month:
- Office apps for up to six users (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and more)
- 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per person
- Highest usage limits for Copilot features, including GPT-4o image generation and voice
- Copilot Podcasts, Deep Research, Vision, and Actions for advanced content creation and analysis
- Reasoning agents like Researcher and Analyst, soon to be embedded in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Cross-device support across Windows, Mac, iPad, and mobile apps
That’s a broad package, especially compared to ChatGPT Plus, which focuses primarily on access to the latest OpenAI models (GPT-5), extended usage limits, and multimodal AI tools like image generation and file analysis.
Where ChatGPT Plus shines in versatility, Microsoft 365 Premium leans hard on productivity workflows, embedding AI directly into the tools people already use to write reports, crunch numbers, design presentations, and manage email.
Bringing Your Own AI to Work
Perhaps the most intriguing twist in Microsoft’s announcement is that Premium, Family, and Personal subscribers can now bring Copilot into the workplace.
Traditionally, Microsoft 365 Copilot features have been locked behind enterprise licenses, meaning businesses had to pay extra to unlock AI functionality in their employees’ Office apps.
Now, anyone with a personal Microsoft 365 subscription can sign into their work version of Office and light up Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook.
Crucially, this doesn’t compromise security. Copilot runs within the enterprise environment, so corporate data remains protected by the same compliance and governance controls as before. The AI features are essentially “unlocked” by the user’s personal subscription but applied to the company’s secure workspace.
