Microsoft has ridden its multibillion-dollar investments in generative AI (genAI) to become the worlds second-most valuable company, witha valuation of roughly $3 trillion, depending on the days stock price.This year, it plans toinvest $80 billionon data center costs alone, and that doesnt count how much its spending to build its in-house AI team.At some point, though, Microsoft needs to start getting serious revenue from its genAI investments. Its been almost three years since Microsoft-funded OpenAI released ChatGPT, on which Microsofts Copilot AI line is based, and more than 14 months since Microsoft 365 Copilot made its debut.The time for getting serious is now.Thats easier said than done. Enterprises that use Microsoft 365 have been balking at paying $30 a month per seatfor Copilot in addition to the basic Microsoft 365 fee the $30 add-on can double the price companies pay for the office suite.A research note from Morgan Stanley,reported by Business Insider, gives one example of why theyre reluctant. It details why the CIO of a pharmaceutical company canceled his enterprises use of Microsoft 365 Copilot after only six months. He complained presentations created in PowerPoint by Copilot were like middle school presentations, called Copilots Word features marginally useful at best, and said it wasnt particularly useful for Excel.The price is double the cost of Microsoft 365, he told Morgan Stanley. And we really just do not see the value were getting out of those tools worth double.Microsoft has been at work trying to beef up Copilot so that enterprises and consumers will see real value and be willing to pay for it. Thats all to the good. But the company is doing something else: squeezing its customers to get them to subscribe, but not adding any additional value.Heres how Microsoft is doing it.Disabling useful Microsoft 365 app features to get businesses to buy CopilotIn January, Microsoft quietly killed two very useful features in its Microsoft 365 apps. One is a Word feature called Researcher, which performs powerful, targeted searches of scientific and academic journals, and embeds properly formatted citations directly into documents. The second is Smart Lookup, which lets you easily do highly targeted online searches from within Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; just highlight a phrase or a word, and it does the searching for you.In the past Ive highlighted both features as among the best in Word inComputerworlds Word for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet. But as I was updating the article recently, I couldnt find either feature. So I did a little digging and found out that Microsoft killed them, because the company claims Copilot duplicates those capabilities and theyre no longer needed.Thats not true. First off, if youre a business or educational customer, you have to pay $30 per user per month for Copilot for researching capabilities that used to be baked into Microsoft 365. Beyond that, Copilot is inferior to both Smart Lookup and Researcher. Copilot doesnt confine itself to using the vetted, high-quality journals Researcher uses; instead, it does a garden-variety web search. It also wont embed properly formatted citations into Word. As for Smart Lookup, its more difficult to perform a search with Copilot than with the original tool. With Copilot you cant highlight words or phrases in a document and have a web search automatically done.Theres also a much bigger problem: Copilot still has a tendency to hallucinate, which is a fancy way of saying it makes things up that simply arent true. Researcher and Smart Lookup use vetted, reliable sources and dont hallucinate. Since you cant trust Copilot not to hallucinate, youve got to do extra work checking its facts and even then you might not be able to spot its hallucinations.Forcing customers to buy Copilot when they buy Microsoft 365Microsoft has taken an even more direct way of getting people to buy Microsoft 365 Copilot bundling the genAI tech into the suite and charging an additional fee for it, whether people want Copilot or not. In January, Microsoftbundled Copilot into the consumer version of Microsoft 365 and increased prices by $3 per month or $30 per year. It was the first time Microsoft had increased prices on the consumer line since it introduced the subscription versions of Office 12 years ago.The companyhyped the inclusion of Copilot into the consumer line in a blog post. However, the post neglected to mention that consumers were going to have to pay for it.The move will bring the company significant new revenue. Microsoft said it had 84.4 million subscribers to the consumer version of Microsoft 365 as of the quarter ending in September 2024. That means the move could bring in more than $2.5 billion in additional revenue a year.Microsoft isnt bundling Copilot with the enterprise version and increasing the price of it, at least not yet. But dont be surprised if the company eventually takes that tack.The upshotTreating your customers this way might be good for short-term revenue boost. But in the long term, its not the right way to run a business. Taking away useful features to get people to buy an add-in they dont want and that isnt as good as the old features wont endear Microsoft to its customers. Neither will charging an additional bundling fee for a product they dont want to buy.Far better would be to create a powerful genAI tool that people would be willing to pay extra for. Im hoping thats what Microsoft will eventually do.