Microsoft and Google target students with new AI offerings

Microsoft and Google are intensifying their focus on the education market with new AI offerings. Microsoft has made its Copilot Chat available for free to students.

After the introduction of ChatGPT, the AI assistant market has entered a phase of explosive growth. Every major company wants to be part of this movement and is releasing major product updates to their AI assistants almost every week.

Today, Microsoft and Google made significant announcements to expand the reach of their generative AI assistants, Copilot and Gemini, respectively, in the education market.

Microsoft offers two distinct Copilot products for education. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a generative AI assistant that has access to organizational data such as emails, documents, and meetings through Microsoft Graph. Copilot Chat is a general-purpose AI assistant that relies on web-based content and includes features such as file uploads, image generation, Copilot Pages, and agents.

Microsoft announced today that Copilot Chat is now available to students aged 13 and older. With Copilot Chat, students and educators can enjoy free, secure AI chat powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, while maintaining IT control through enterprise-grade data protection and management.

After losing general consumer market share to ChatGPT, Google is now aggressively promoting its Gemini AI assistant. Google is offering a free 12-month Google AI Pro plan to all students aged 18 and older in the U.S., Japan, Indonesia, Korea, and Brazil.

The Google AI Pro plan includes:

Expanded access to the Gemini 2.5 Pro model
Deep Research for generating custom research reports
NotebookLM with five times more audio and video overviews
Veo 3, which converts text or photos into 8-second videos with sound
Higher usage limits for Jules, Google’s new asynchronous AI coding agent
2 TB of storage shared across Google Photos, Drive, and Gmail

Additionally, Google announced Guided Learning, a new mode in Gemini designed to support students during their learning process. Instead of providing direct answers, Guided Learning offers questions and step-by-step assistance to help students understand the material, similar to the recently launched ChatGPT Study Mode.