Office suite assistants

The per-seat question

Microsoft and Google both sell an AI assistant embedded across their office suites, at a per-user monthly price that has generally sat in the region of a consumer assistant subscription or above, on top of the licence you already pay. For an organisation of any size that is a substantial number, and it is usually decided by whoever is most enthusiastic rather than by measurement.

The decision deserves the same treatment as any other in this course: what does it do that a $20 consumer subscription plus copy and paste does not?

What the integration buys

Access to your own material without uploading it. The assistant can reach your mail, files, calendar and chat history within the tenant. Asking “summarise the thread with the supplier about the delayed shipment” works because it can find the thread. That is a real capability and it is the main thing you are paying for.

It stays inside the organisation’s boundary. Content does not leave for a third-party service, which is often what makes the tool permissible at all in a regulated setting. For many buyers this, not capability, is the actual reason.

Meeting summaries and recaps tied to the calendar and the recording, with attendance and follow-ups.

In-place editing. Rewriting inside the document rather than in a chat window and back. Small, and it adds up over a day.

What it does not buy

A better model. These products run the same class of model as the consumer assistants, sometimes an older or smaller one for cost reasons.

Reliability on your data. Retrieval across a large organisation’s files is hard, and the common complaint is not a wrong answer but an unhelpful one: it did not find the document, or it found an old version. Test on your own messy shared drive, not on a demonstration tenant.

Freedom from checking. A summary of a mail thread can drop the qualifying sentence, and a document draft can invent a figure. The material is yours, which makes errors more plausible and therefore easier to miss.

The evaluation to run before buying seats for everyone

Buy five licences for a month and pick five people who do different jobs. Ask each to keep the two-week line-a-day record from earlier in this course: minutes saved, minutes spent checking, and one thing it could not do.

Then look at the distribution rather than the average. The usual finding is that it is transformative for two roles (often anyone who lives in a mailbox or writes repetitive documents) and close to useless for the rest. That is an argument for buying it for those roles, which is a very different purchase from buying it for everybody.

Permissions, which is where this bites

An assistant that can search everything the user can search will surface things the user could always technically reach and never actually found. Over-broad file sharing that was harmless when nobody browsed the shared drive becomes visible when a natural-language question retrieves it.

The right sequence is to tidy permissions first and deploy second. Organisations that do it the other way round discover their sharing practices through an assistant cheerfully quoting a salary spreadsheet that was shared with everyone in 2019.

The licensing trap

One detail catches organisations out at renewal. These assistants are usually sold as an add-on to a specific licence tier, and buying them sometimes requires upgrading the underlying licence first. The advertised per-seat price is then not the increase you experience.

Ask for the total change to the invoice rather than the price of the add-on, and ask whether the commitment is monthly or annual. Annual commitments are common here and they lock in a decision about a fast-moving product for a year, which is exactly the situation where a pilot on five seats first is worth the delay.

The free path

For an individual or a small team: a consumer assistant subscription, plus the browser extensions or the desktop app for context, plus copy and paste. You lose the automatic access to your own material, and you keep most of the benefit for a fraction of the price.

For a small organisation, that arrangement plus a clear rule about what may be pasted is frequently the correct answer, and the per-seat product becomes worth it at the point where searching your own material is the bottleneck rather than the writing.