Microsoft Unveils Bing Chat Enterprise and Visual Search Feature
Microsoft has introduced a new version of the Bing generative AI chatbot aimed at businesses designed around the data privacy and governance controls businesses require. Bing Chat Enterprise brings the same capabilities as the existing chatbot, including the upcoming Visual Search feature the tech giant announced at the same time.
Enterprise Privacy
Unlike the consumer version of Bing Chat, Microsoft stated that Bing Chat Enterprise won’t save chat data, give Microsoft visibility into business data, or use customer data to train its AI models. The company said these measures address concerns from corporate clients about empowering their workforce with AI while still protecting sensitive information. Bing Chat Enterprise can therefore use proprietary or confidential information to perform like writing product descriptions or evaluating rival products to unreleased products. Microsoft is making Bing Chat Enterprise available on the web and through the Edge browser, with a Windows Copilot version to come. The chatbot will become an additional feature for Microsoft 365 customers, but companies can sign up to use it independently at $5 a month per user.
“Employees are looking to use AI tools to help them unlock creativity and productivity at work—70 percent say they would delegate as much work as possible to AI according to our Work Trend Index. But using AI tools that aren’t built for the enterprise inadvertently puts sensitive business data at risk. As organizations adopt AI, they want to be confident that their data is protected,” Microsoft consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi and consumer vice president of modern work and business apps Jared Spataro wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. “Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. With Bing Chat Enterprise, user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the organization. What goes in—and comes out—remains protected. “
Visual Search
The enterprise and consumer versions of Bing Chat will soon have a new pictorial tool for finding information as well. The upcoming Visual Search feature leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to process photos uploaded by users to provide contextually relevant information. Bing will analyze uploaded images and search the web for information related to the image so it can answer any questions connected to it. For instance, a user could either list what’s in their pantry and ask for recipe ideas or take a picture of the pantry and ask Bing the same question. Visual Search is coming first to Bing Chat’s website and mobile app, but Bing Chat Enterprise won’t be left out for long.
“Visual Search lets anyone upload images and search the web for related content,” Mehdi and Spataro wrote. “Take a picture, or use one you find elsewhere and prompt Bing to tell you about it — Bing can understand the context of an image, interpret it and answer questions about it.”
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