Microsoft’s Copilot promoting has been criticized by an trade watchdog for its productiveness claims and complicated use of Copilot branding. The Higher Enterprise Bureau’s Nationwide Promoting Division (NAD) has reviewed Microsoft’s Copilot advertising, and advisable that the software program big discontinues or modifies productiveness claims about Microsoft 365 Copilot and extra clearly disclose the constraints of its Enterprise Chat characteristic.
Microsoft has been claiming that Copilot has productiveness and return on funding (ROI) advantages for companies that undertake the AI assistant, together with that “67%, 70%, and 75% of customers say they’re extra productive” after a certain quantity of Copilot utilization. “NAD discovered that though the research demonstrates a notion of productiveness, it doesn’t present a great match for the target declare at difficulty,” says the watchdog in its assessment. “Because of this, NAD advisable the declare be discontinued or modified to reveal the idea for the declare.”
Alongside the advisable productiveness promoting adjustments, NAD additionally means that customers of Copilot could possibly be confused by Microsoft’s large use of the Copilot branding throughout a number of merchandise — together with Enterprise Chat. “NAD concluded, primarily based on the context of the claims and common use of the product description as ‘Copilot,‘ that customers wouldn’t essentially perceive the variations.” NAD has advisable that Microsoft now “modify its promoting to obviously and conspicuously disclose any materials limitations associated to how Enterprise Chat assists customers.”
Microsoft has had years of complicated branding for Copilot. Microsoft relaunched its Copilot for business with free AI chat and pay-as-you-go brokers earlier this yr, in an try and simplify a few of its branding woes. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat because it’s identified now, began off as Bing Chat Enterprise earlier than Microsoft then rebranded it, confusingly, to simply Copilot. Someplace in the midst of all this rebranding, Enterprise Chat — which was initially a chatbot in Groups — is now Enterprise Chat for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Microsoft says it disagrees with NAD’s conclusions, however that it “will comply with NAD’s suggestions for clarifying its claims.” Hopefully that signifies that Copilot branding goes to be clearer sooner or later.