Microsoft introduces 'Bing Chat' to enterprise

Microsoft aims to provide better privacy to businesses with the new AI-powered Bing Chat enterprise.

Microsoft launched Bing Chat Enterprise, a variant of Bing Chat with business-focused data privacy and governance controls, during its yearly Inspire conference. A customer's employee or business data is not visible to Microsoft while using Bing Chat Enterprise, and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI models.

"We’ve heard from many corporate customers who are excited to empower their organizations with powerful new AI tools but are concerned that their companies’ data will not be protected," Microsoft’s chief communications officer, Frank X. Shaw, shared with TechCrunch.

"[Using Bing Chat Enterprise,] what goes in — and comes out — remains protected, giving commercial customers managed access to better answers, greater efficiency and new ways to be creative."

To Shaw's point, businesses have voiced concerns about confidential data getting into the hands of developers who built the models on user data when it comes to chatbots like Bing Chat. Apple has limited the internal usage of products like OpenAI's ChatGPT and GitHub's Copilot, which is acquired by Microsoft. Samsung, Walmart, Verizon, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and others had already done the same.

Apart from the data controls, Bing Chat Enterprise functions similarly to Bing Chat and is now preview-only. It can respond to queries in text as well as with graphs, charts, and photos. An employee may, for instance, ask Bing Chat Enterprise to develop messaging for a new product or to compare it to a competitor while still including private information like the product's specifications and price in the prompt.

Bing Chat Enterprise will soon be able to answer inquiries about submitted images and search the web for relevant content thanks to a forthcoming feature called Visual Search. Today saw the launch of Visual Search in Bing Chat for both the web and mobile.

Anywhere Bing Chat is supported, including Bing.com/chat, the Microsoft Edge sidebar, and eventually from Windows Copilot, the Windows-native version of Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise can be used. It is free for users who have Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium subscriptions, and it will eventually be sold separately for $5 per user per month.

When an employee connects to Bing with the Microsoft Account linked to their company, Bing Chat Enterprise is automatically enabled.